Managing permissions in Confluence Cloud Free version - Cannot create spaces

[Sam H]

I have a Free subscription to Confluence Cloud that was originally on Confluence Server, with 2 users.

With the "user" level accounts, it is not possible to create spaces, only to add pages to existing spaces where access exists.

From the "admin" account, it is possible to create spaces, but these are not visible to the "user" account (and visiting via a direct URL advises that no access is available).

Using the support documentation (here) it appears that "everyone who can log in to your Confluence site" should be able to "view, add, and edit spaces and pages" but that is not the case as described above.

Additionally, when using the "admin" account to try and open the space to all users following the above documentation, it is not possible as I am told "You're on the free plan, so you can't change the space permissions". The documentation states "If needed, you can open up the space to all users" for the Free plan, so I'm not sure what the conflict is.

Looking at the Global Settings I can see that "confluence-users" has an X for "Create Spaces" (and that can't be changed either, despite the above advice about everyone being able to add spaces) but that doesn't explain why a created space isn't available to that level of account.

I'm at a bit of a loss with trying to understand the issue so any advice is welcomed.

Edit: To confirm whether this was an effect of migration, I created a brand new user. This new account could create spaces, and could also see spaces created by the admin user, but not any of the migrated spaces.

Looking at the user and their groups, I could see that two "migrated" users were members of confluence-users, and the new user was a member of confluence-users-sitename.

Adding the new user to the latter group allowed them to see all of the existing spaces, as well as retain their ability to create spaces. This being despite both groups having an X in the "Create Spaces" global permission.

Adding the migrated users to the new group allowed them to see the newly create spaces that they previously could not, but did not permit them to make new spaces.

This feels to me like an issue with the migration process and user/group management.