Permission issue after downgrading to Free plan

[Richard Irvin]

Last week we downgraded our Premium trial down to the Free plan. When this happened our permissions broke, as well as some other quirkiness. If anyone can provide suggestions on how to fix this I'd be very grateful.

Problem Statement:

• After downgrading from Jira Premium to the Jira Free account one of our org-admin's lost access to a Kanban board.
• The Jira Software project no longer exists. Instead the Kanban board is showing under a "Space".
• We never used Confluence, so we should never have had a space.
• No projects show in Jira Software now.
• We have not been able to add him back to the space so that he can fully administrator that area and create stories\bugs\tasks
• The "Add People" button, within the Space settings, is greyed out.

Troubleshooting Steps Taken:

• Validated he has access to the Jira Software app.
• Validated he is a part of the same groups that unaffected users are a part of.
• Remove and re-added him to all groups & applications.
• Invited a new email with the same issue.
• Added the Confluence app, and no spaces show in there.
• Remove the users account entirely and re-invited.

We have reached the end of what AI can troubleshoot for us, and given that we're a free account we're not allowed to submit tickets directly to Atlassian. Does the community have any thoughts?

[Mikael Sandberg]

Hi @Richard Irvin,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

The free plan doesn't have permissions, so that would explain why the add people button is grayed out. On the free plan everyone have space permssions, and the permission scheme is ignored.

And regarding space, since the end of 2025, projects are now called spaces in Jira and you can learn more about it here.

Regarding the board, it might be an issue with the filter used, I would create a new board and see if the user in question have access to the new one.

[Trudy Claspill]

Adding to what Michael said...

If you downgraded from Premium to Free then any existing association of People to Roles in Project/Spaces and any pre-existing Permission Schemes will be enforced, but you won't be able to add more people to roles in the Project/Spaces. So if you have a Permission Scheme for a project that allocates Permissions to Roles, only people in those roles will retain those permissions in that Project and you won't be able to add more people to the Roles.

For any brand new projects created, without sharing the Permission scheme of another project, will be created with a default permission scheme that allocates permissions to all users, and all users will have the effective access of a Project Administrator in those projects.

Refer to this document for the above information:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/what-is-the-free-jira-cloud-plan/

[Richard Irvin]

@Trudy Claspill I think you might have explained it. We did have permission sets setup before the downgrade, and now we don't have the ability to update them so that the one person who lost access can be added back. I will give creating a new project a shot and see how that works. 

[Richard Irvin]

Creating the new space seems to have resolved our issues. Thanks both of you!

[Trudy Claspill]

Another alternative to a new project is to upgrade to a trial of the Standard version, use the Add People option to add more people to the project to align with the permissions scheme for the project, then downgrade to Free again.

A third option is to take the permission scheme created/used by the new Company Managed project you created and associate the scheme to the original project to open up permissions on that project.

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