Bitbucket cleanup of free unused workspaces: what you need to know

[Efferon]

WTF. Corporate over-reach. Tell me to reactivate. Then make it difficult to reactivate. This is why after 1 year their stock has gone from $322.94 to 159.56 (down 42.62% as of today).  

Atlassian - when you make a change; you need to walk in your customers shoes! Make it easy. Stop making it hard.  

In your case you send an email explaining you need to active. You have a link for more information. Which brings you to this post. And this post still leaves you hanging with out the information you need. 

[chenjianjx NA]

But what's a workspace?  I can only see "projects" and "repositories". Don't see any "workspace"

If some repos under a project are active while others not, what will happen?

[fss-tamura]

First off, I'm a bit annoyed that such an important change was only posted to the community and that I wasn't notified by email at the time it was posted.

The workspaces marked for deletion in this email are workspaces I created on Bitbucket back when it was possible to create workspaces on the Bitbucket service. These workspaces are listed in the email regardless of whether I'm accessing them or performing operations like pushing/pulling.

To address a warning from Atlassian several months ago about workspace capacity limits, I created multiple workspaces within my Atlassian organization and moved several repositories into those workspaces.
These workspaces are not listed as deletion targets in this email. I suspect this is because they fall under the “Atlassian apps” mentioned in their statement: “Your Bitbucket user profile, other active workspaces, and all your other Atlassian apps are not affected by this cleanup.”

Regardless, I believe they should clarify which workspaces are affected, how to prevent deletion, and when/where the Reactivate button will appear.

[alex-85]

how do I know if my repository is affected? is there any clear indication in the workspace area? 

[susahosh]

This is ridiculous!!! I have been a bitbucket user for over a decade. I have workspaces and projects going back just as long. This is where I keep all my work. Yes some projects are older but this is only copy I have and now you are deciding to delete them even though my account is active! This doesn't make any sense. Deleting inactive users I can understand but you are deleting content within my active account. I have to now go though every single repo and make a commit? How am I supposed to keep my work space "Active"?

[FJamal]

will staging a commit from bitbucket count as updating ?

[David at David Simpson Apps]

Just in case you're trying to understand what a workspace is, because the term is not mentioned anywhere in the Bitbucket UI:

https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/what-is-a-workspace/

Yeah, I didn't understand what one was either. Or where all my repos had gone - Atlassian had them hidden by default.

[deckers91]

Terrible decision, also my workspace with 108 repos and daily pushes and pulls is now flagged for deletion.

Terrible timing also, who wants to migrate all their stuff over to gitlab over the christmas holidays?

Giving us one month time to migrate possible 100s of repos over to a platform that behaves less hostile to their users is also cutting it close...

[Michael Hohlfeld]

Yes. Fair enough to close unused workspaces.

Question: How can I identify which of my workspaces is affected by a potential deletion?

[Endolith]

So does this mean Bitbucket is dying and we should move all our repos to GitHub/GitLab/etc.?

[Endolith]

"You must login and update your content before January 15, 2026 to keep your workspace."

What does "update" mean?

[Ovidiu Gabriel]

Better tell you want us to pay.

But Atlassian makes it very hard to pay, minimum 5 users/workspace. Why? I don't have 5 users for each workspace.

Then, they removed the feature that allowed you to see all repositories in all workspaces, you have to navigate to each workspace to see the list of repositories, and waste a lot of time with this navigation.

Atlassian makes harder for them to earn money and easy to lose customers. I don't understand why.

[Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath]

A question and two suggestions.

1. What action qualifies as "visiting a workspace"?  For example, does visiting the workspace via the web portal suffice?

2. In the notification emails that you send to users, please highlight the name of candidate workspaces in bold.

3. In the web interface, please highlight the workspaces that are candidate for deactivation.

Thanks in advance!

[waynetheonly]

Can you make the process of re-activating workspaces a little more confusing? First how do I navigate between workspaces, second where do I find the mysterious "Reactivate Workspace" button?

[Ovidiu Gabriel]

@Way  you have to click your avatar and then click on "All workspaces" option 

Or simply follow this link 

https://bitbucket.org/account/workspaces/

[waynetheonly]

@Ovidiu Gabriel Yes, I figured that out after poking around for half an hour. Now where's the "Reactivate Workspace" button? Or at least how do I reactivate the workspace?

[colin_brislawn]

Atlassian Corp

NASDAQ: TEAM

Mkt cap $42.62B

But they can't store our repos for free, huh?

[Yana]

Hi all, 

Thank you for posting your questions! 

Please allow me to work on a comprehensive FAQ that will cover your questions and I'll update the original post to address as many of your questions as I can early next week. 

Appreciate your patience! 

---

Update as of December 22. 

We have posted FAQ to help clarify and address questions asked by Bitbucket Community. 

If there are any other questions that are not answered by the FAQ, please add them and we will make sure to answer them and provide you with comprehensive responses. 

Thank you

[etaxi341]

On god this is a dumb change... Felt safe here and now have the hassle to migrate 10 years of projects to github... thanks

[bo3b]

OK, you just demonstrated that you cannot be trusted. Unilaterally changing the agreement after the fact, just like Unity did with their licensing.  Once lost, trust cannot be restored.  As if you care. The most important thing for you is the enshittification of your product to make every last penny that you can. 

The absolute most important thing to me was the continuity and reliability. I think in terms of my code lasting 10 years, not 6 months. It may be 'inactive' because it's stable.  These 'inactive' repos are costing less than 100MB of storage, a trivial cost.

I will never use BitBucket again, you are dead to me.

[Ron L.]

So, I had not used my personal Bitbucket account for some time. I wanted to do some testing and went to log into it today and my repos are gone. But, what is even more strange is that the Create button is missing. Where I can create a Repo/Project/Package and such. It's missing like I don't have permissions. But, it's my personal account with only me on it. 

It kept asking me to create a Workspace. But, I went to create Workspace with what I thought I might have had before as the Workspace ID. Sure enough, says it exists already. So, my Workspace is there. But, I can't reach it and my repos are gone. (As a side note, when on the Create Workspace page, in the upper right corner it shows me "Log In"...like I'm not logged in. It's a mess.  

I ended up here because this my personal free account and I can't regular support on it. But, of course, I see this post and looks like if people have problems, they are out of luck. There is no way to give feedback of any issues unless you pay it seems. 

[ssokolow]

@Ron L.  For me, it was clicking the Atlassian logo in the top-left corner, then logging in there, then clicking the 9-dot square in the header and clicking BitBucket, then clicking my avatar in the top-right and clicking "All workspaces"... definitely a reason to consider migrating to GitHub, GitLab, or Codeberg on terrible UX alone.

[Yana]

@Ron L. 

We are trying to respond to all questions posted, and Bitbucket has a community support that can help you get answers. 

With your current profile, the one you used to post here, you are not part of any Bitbucket workspace, so this is why you do not have an option to create a project or a repo and are prompted to create a new workspace. 

If you are saying that the workspace you are trying to create already exists, there is a strong chance that you had potentially created it under a different profile (different email address).  I'll ask one of our Support engineers to reach out to you to help. 

[Ron L.]

@Yana Thanks for the response. But, pretty sure this is the correct profile. If it was incorrect,  then when I put in https://bitbucket.org/<workspaceID>/workspace/overview/, I would get an access denied. Instead, I get a Welcome to Bitbucket screen. For the workspaceID, I put in the workspace ID that I believe I was using before. I could be wrong. However, it's strange that I would get an access denied. 

Also, when I go to All Workspaces, I get a Create a workspace screen. But, in the upper right hand corner, I get a "Log In" and "Sign Up" option where my normal logged in avatar would be. Basically, acting like I'm not logged in. Which doesn't make sense since I came from a logged in page. Seems  something is not right. 

[Chloe]

@Ron L. Just chiming in to say - maybe we've run in to the same issue?

When I tried to sign back in to my Bitbucket account after seeing this announcement, a strange series of things happened that I don't exactly recall but that ultimately ended with me seemingly being forced to create a new Atlassian account with the same username as my Bitbucket account.

Every authentication-based interaction I've had with Bitbucket since then has led me to believe that either I screwed up quite badly or Atlassian did (perhaps some kind of attempted Atlassian/Bitbucket account merge in the years leading up to this announcement?). My entire Bitbucket authentication experience now feels cursed in that particular, Atlassian-flavored way - hard to articulate, but instantly recognizable as a product of Atlassian tech debt.

tl;dr: Maybe you need to use your Bitbucket username to create a new Atlassian account and join me in this Atlassian account purgatory?