We’ve reversed our decision to deprecate free runner versions. We will continue to provide a free self-hosted runners option going forward.
First of all, thanks for listening to our feedback and for continuing to support the free Runner version.
On the other hand, could you clarify whether the free version will stay on the locked Version 4, or if it will use a different tag than the premium version going forward?
You will update the runners, but only the currently available one (v4) is free of charge. Any future updates, fixes, or improvements will only be available if we pay for them?
So effectively, everyone will end up stuck on an increasingly outdated runner unless we pay Atlassian for the privilege of using our own hardware?
Regarding your statement:
“Additionally, many of our customers want us to continue to innovate in this space, which comes with real costs on our end. So we will continue to offer a premium tier, which we will charge for per the announced pricing.”
I have a simple question: What exactly are we paying our regular Bitbucket license for then? And on top of that, our already expensive Jira and Confluence licenses?
The pricing model as it stands seems to be:
we pay monthly for the products we already use, and
we have to pay extra again if we want to receive updates and improvements in this area.
This feels like we are being charged twice for the same product evolution. Honestly, the situation with Atlassian’s pricing these days comes across as increasingly unreasonable.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 26, 2026 edited
Hi everyone, we've finalised our plans for the implementation of a premium runners tier and have published all the details via a dedicated Bitbucket Cloud blog post. There are important details contained in the update that relate to the migration from the existing runners implementation to the new free/premium tiered model, so please familiarise yourself with the upcoming changes.
Thank you to everyone for your engagement with this process as we work towards a model that allows us to grow our investment in this critical piece of functionality.
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