Announcing powerful upgrades & a new pricing model for self-hosted runners

[#1]

Update (December 17, 2025): Thank you for sharing your feedback regarding the pricing change announced below. We hear your concern about moving our self-hosted runner capabilities from a free offering to paid.

Based on your feedback, we’re going to reconsider our pricing approach for the new Runners V5 capability. As a reminder, Runners up to V4 remain free to use, and the recently launched Runners V5 will still incur the costs outlined below. We’ll share further updates in the new year.

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Hi everyone,

We just shipped Bitbucket Pipelines self-hosted runners V5 with several upgrades.

What's new:

This release includes the ability to optimize builds with customizable resource allocations per step, use Docker volume mounts to share data between steps, and, to meet any compliance needs, you can point build artifacts to be stored in your private cloud.

We’re also setting the stage for future enhancements, such as APIs for managing your runners and the ability to run multiple, disposable macOS VMs on a single machine for scalable iOS/macOS development.

Pricing model:

With this upgrade, we are also announcing the move to a paid licensing model. We recognize that self-hosted runners are a crucial requirement for teams to meet their compliance obligations. Moving from free to a paid model enables us to accelerate development, deliver enhanced support, and build the enterprise-grade experience you expect.

To allow time for transition, runners prior to V5 will remain available and free to use until Jun 3, 2026.

Review our blog for details on what’s shipping in this release, pricing details, and the transition timeline.

Let us know if you have any questions and share any feedback on future enhancements you'd want to see.

[Joris Vleminckx]

So, we're going to have to pay you to run our runners *on our own hardware*... wow, just wow.

[Louis-André Bergeron]

Business Team to dev team : "Please prepare a feature update, we want to hide a greedy cash grab behind a couple of features so it doesn't look as bad"

[James Kerns]

Thanks for making us pay for running on our own hardware. Appreciate it.

[Ferry Schoenmakers]

Seriously? So you're making us pay you to run stuff on our own hardware!? That's incredible!
Gitlab, here we come...

[Johannes Bauer]

This is really annoying.

We use a lot of self-hosted runners for our customers, because it is the only way to deploy something to the customer environments.

Now we have to pay for all these runners that are not even hosted in the Bitbucket cloud.

Unbelievable!

[Indra Rizky]

I mean, even if you charging for a service that we host ourselves, you should really offer more features and make sure it's stable. Otherwise, it feels like a waste to pay for something that competitors provide for free.

[Benjamin Löffler]

So, to understand this correctly, we pay you for the cloud service where our repositories are located, and we also pay you so that we can use our OWN hardware. That is, the hardware that WE manage, WE pay for and WE run ourselves.
Okay, that makes sense. It would be unfair if we only paid for things that you provide. It's better that we also pay for things that WE provide ourselves. Sounds very fair.
Oh and just out of interest, who actually shit in your brains?

[Sergey Petrushin]

We tolerated the feature deficit in their CI/CD for years. And what happened when they finally added the necessary functionality? They immediately hid it behind the expensive subscription tier, turning it into an instrument of extortion. Now they are even trying to force us to pay for our own hardware. We have had enough. Their greed has reached a breaking point. We are moving out.

[Bhavyai Gupta]

Just found this article because we were exploring migrating from Buildbot to self-hosted Bitbucket runners, so that there is improved visibility and one point of control.

Well, it feels like an insult - pay Atlassian to use my own machine!?

No, thank you.

[Ash Moosa]

Hi all, based on your feedback, we've decided to reconsider our pricing model. I've posted the update on the post above. We'll share more in the new year!

[Benjamin Löffler]

@Ash Moosa just to be clear and I want to be really clear here: anything else that says ‘self-hosted runners are and will continue to be free to use without numerical restrictions’ is 100% unacceptable to the community.

When you write above that we need to remember that everything up to V4 will remain free, it sounds like we should just use the outdated stuff for free and pay for the newer stuff. That is unacceptable.

It's nice to hear that Atlassian is moving away from this, but Atlassian needs to make it clear that paying to use your OWN hardware is 100% unacceptable (even if only a minimal payment is required).

[Joris Vleminckx]

Two question about your update:

> Based on your feedback, we’re going to reconsider our pricing approach for the new Runners V5 capability. As a reminder, Runners up to V4 remain free to use. We’ll share further updates in the new year.

1/ When you announced the new pricing model, I had just spun up a new runner and by default it uses v5 ("Runner version: 5.4.0"). Will it be possible to deploy "older" versions?

2/ When checking now, it seems those new runners are automatically shut down after a few seconds:

```
[2025-12-18 12:37:41,549] Runner starting.
[2025-12-18 12:37:47,919] Runner version: 5.4.0
[2025-12-18 12:37:47,927] Runner runtime: linux-docker
[2025-12-18 12:37:48,022] Copying Docker cli to working directory.
[2025-12-18 12:37:48,870] Starting websocket listening to RUNNER_UPDATED events.
[2025-12-18 12:37:49,040] Updating runner status to "ONLINE" and checking for new steps assigned to the runner after 0 seconds and then every 30 seconds.
[2025-12-18 12:37:49,293] Updating runner state to "ONLINE".
[2025-12-18 12:37:50,786] {"traceId":"6943f597cf0445b12ee62c002bf2407b","parentId":"2ee62c002bf2407b","id":"41136a03b0741bea","kind":"CLIENT","name":"PUT","timestamp":1766061470370636,"duration":413289,"localEndpoint":{"serviceName":"runner","ipv4":"172.17.0.2"},"tags":{"http.method":"PUT","http.path":"/ex/bitbucket-pipelines/rest/internal/accounts/{29ebfb6d-e282-468d-bb98-9ee580e6149a}/runners/{da138a12-d5c9-5cf5-a7b8-aebbbf946012}/state"}}
[2025-12-18 12:37:50,815] Runner complete.
[2025-12-18 12:37:50,819] Shutdown completed
```
What's the deal here?

[Liam Nunns]

Hi @Joris Vleminckx 

Sorry to hear about your experience:

The easiest way to download an old version is to select the desired version from our changelog and then adjust the download link to suit the version you want.
I can see that this isn't documented as accessibly as it should be, I'll make sure this is fixed Monday
Your experience around the runner crashing is not expected, please raise a support ticket and I'll check in to investigate, I recommend using 3.32.0 at present.

Docker base images:
docker pull docker-public.packages.atlassian.com/sox/atlassian/bitbucket-pipelines-runner:3

MacOS/Linux Shell runner:
curl https://product-downloads.atlassian.com/software/bitbucket/pipelines/atlassian-bitbucket-pipelines-runner-3.32.0.tar.gz --output atlassian-bitbucket-pipelines-runner.tar.gz

Windows Powershell
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://product-downloads.atlassian.com/software/bitbucket/pipelines/atlassian-bitbucket-pipelines-runner-3.32.0.zip -OutFile .\atlassian-bitbucket-pipelines-runner.zip

 Thanks,

Liam Nunns
Bitbucket Pipelines - Senior Engineering Manager

[Daniil Penkin]

Hello @Joris Vleminckx,

Regarding the runner that shuts down right after it starts up — this happens because this runner is in DISABLED state, meaning it was manually disabled in Bitbucket workspace settings.

When disabled, a runner automatically shuts down if it doesn't have any steps assigned (this means it will gracefully shut down if disabled when building a step only after that build completes).

Older runner versions in fact behave the same way. To fix this problem with your runner, re-enable it in the workspace settings UI, then start it up again — it should no longer shut down even if idle.

We will make this clear in the documentation and runner logs, sorry about the inconvenience.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Daniil

[Joris Vleminckx]

@Liam Nunns @Daniil Penkin 
Thanks for the quick replies!

1/ Ok, so just changing the docker tag in our case. Cool, it worked.

2/ True, this one is on me. The runner was indeed disabled in the Bitbucket page. Now it's up and running in v3.

[Arthur Boyer]

I just wanted to reiterate what's already been said with a note about our experience.

The first we heard about these changes was after updating our runners and realising builds weren't happening. We actually had to open a support ticket to work out what was happening. Once we realised the runner were rolled back to version v4.3.

This was an extremely negative experience and has coloured our perceptions of BitBucket and its long term viability as a platform.

If there's going to be a charge for self hosted runners that's outside what we already pay to use the platform then we will be leaving it. The competition has features that we want, and this is exactly the kind of push that we need to make the move.

I hope that you will do the right thing and give up on this foolish cash grab.

[Angga Kusumandaru]

I am just coming in this topic, after found some queuing on pipeline, event we have 10 runner ready on kubernetes workload, we use latest image, so it updated automatically.

• GitHub's $0.002/minute charge (starting March 2026): At least proportional to actual usage and covers GitHub's orchestration platform
• GitLab CI/CD: Completely free self-hosted runners—no per-slot, no per-minute platform fees​
• CircleCI: No runner slot fees; charges only for consumed compute credits​

Self-hosted runners on your infrastructure should not incur per-capacity platform fees.

We're long-standing Bitbucket customers already paying per-user subscriptions. Introducing separate per-slot runner licensing feels like a 'double payment' for infrastructure we control.

[Paul Züchner]

I increased the concurrency limit for self-hosted runners from 1 to 5 runners for a time period of 10 minutes in total before I reset it to 1, because I found out Atlassian charges $15 per self-hosted runner per month by finding a redit post on google.

The warning shown in the "Set your concurrency limit" menu mentions two articles; neither of them mentions a fee for self-hosted runners. It also misled me into believing the warning is shown for free tier users that reach their "Concurrent steps limit of 10".

I will suggest my company to quit the atlassian suite entirely.

[Liam Nunns]

@Paul Züchner - please raise a support request specifying you made a genuine mistake/the cost consequences weren't clear and you didn't intend to make a purchase - i'll ask the support team to keep an eye on it, link to this comment in it if you can please.

We have reviewed the content/warning flow, i'll look at it again to see if we can do better, we've also made a change to make it easier to provision a V3/V4 runner in the UI.

Keep in mind you can continue using V3/V4 runners while we complete our pricing review as per:

"Update (December 17, 2025): Thank you for sharing your feedback regarding the pricing change announced below. We hear your concern about moving our self-hosted runner capabilities from a free offering to paid.

Based on your feedback, we’re going to reconsider our pricing approach for the new Runners V5 capability. As a reminder, Runners up to V4 remain free to use, and the recently launched Runners V5 will still incur the costs outlined below. We’ll share further updates in the new year."

[Benjamin Löffler]

Are there any updates on this?

Will self hosted runners now be billed or not? If they will be billed we need to know soon to have enough time to move to the free competitors.

Its still unclear what will happen. You wrote that runners up to V4 remain free. But they will be deprecated some time soon I guess, right?

Also this means that no updates at all will be available unless you pay for self hosted runners, right?

The community wants a clear communication from Atlassian for this topic. What will happen and what are the consequences?

You already gave enough arguments to move away for good, but I would rather stick to the current setup without the need to move away. So please give some updates

[Paul Züchner]

@Liam Nunns thanks for the advice.

There is one more thing the Atlassian Team should reconsider, because the Billing-Period ended during the weekend, we payed $60 dollars to use four additional self-hosted runner slots just for three days, or at least I assume this is the case. So it is not very clear, in which time spane one can use the slots, just until the end of the billing period or for 30 days.  

[Andy Stutzmann]

So your update says

[...]As a reminder, Runners up to V4 remain free to use, and the recently launched Runners V5 will still incur the costs outlined below. We’ll share further updates in the new year.

But on our workspace settings the info box says

Runners deprecation timeline

Version 3 and 4 runners will be deprecated on June 3, 2026 (monthly plans) and on December 3, 2026 (annual plans).

So basically your solution for people complaining about the pricing is to put them on a soon to be deprecated version to delay the forced pricing?