IUL Partners — really need to ticket every Marketplace vendor just to add users?

[Kent G]

Hey all,

Hoping to sanity-check something with other Partners on the free Internal Use License (IUL) program, because if this is really how it works, it's a pretty rough look for the whole ecosystem.

We're approaching the 100-user cap on Jira Software and went to process a routine tier upgrade. Simple enough, right? Instead, we were told we'd need to individually open a ticket or reach out to every single Marketplace app vendor we use — half a dozen-plus apps — to request promo/discount codes just so our app licensing matches the new user tier.

To be clear: I'm not chasing discounts here. I'd happily pay full price across every app in our stack if it meant skipping this entirely. But apparently that's not even an option — the promo code process seems to be baked into how the tier upgrade works, not something you can opt out of by just paying more. So even Partners willing to forgo any vendor discount still get stuck doing one-by-one, vendor-by-vendor outreach, each with its own turnaround time, just to add headroom to our own internal instance.

If that's genuinely the expectation, it's hard to overstate how backwards it feels. Adding users to your own license shouldn't turn into a multi-week scavenger hunt across every vendor in your Marketplace stack — especially when the customer is explicitly willing to pay more to avoid it. It puts the burden of Atlassian's own tiering/licensing architecture entirely onto the customer, with no "just charge me full price" escape hatch.

A few questions for the community:

• Is this actually standard across the IUL program, or are we getting an unusually painful answer from support?
• Has anyone been able to pay full price and skip the vendor promo-code process entirely? If so, how?
• Has anyone found a faster path — does your Partner Manager or Atlassian rep coordinate vendor outreach on your behalf, or is it really all on you?
• For those who've upgraded tiers recently, how long did the vendor-by-vendor coordination actually take, start to finish?

If this is working as intended, it's a genuinely bad partner/customer experience and I'd love to know if others have pushed back on it successfully. Thanks for any insight.