Quick check: Oct 15 Cloud price changes — do the Team ’25 releases justify them?

[Björn Döhler]

Just got back from Team ’25 Europe in Barcelona and had a ton of hallway chats with admins and partners. A consistent theme: cost pressure feels higher than ever. 

Vendor disclosure: I work for an Atlassian Marketplace vendor. We built a user management and license optimizer app that helps identify inactive accounts and right-size licenses. No links here - just context for why I care about this topic.

From what I’m seeing, Atlassian’s cloud list-price updates took effect on October 15, 2025 (yesterday). Partner roundups summarize changes like ~5% on Standard, ~7.5% on Premium, and ~7.5-10% on some Enterprise editions (Jira, Confluence, JSM), plus ~10% on Bitbucket - details vary by product/edition. 

Separately, maximum quantity billing for monthly subscriptions/apps is rolling out broadly by the end of October, which can change how spikes within a billing cycle are charged. 

At the same time, Atlassian has been shipping and showcasing a lot - AI/Rovo updates, new “Collections,” admin/audit improvements, etc. I’m curious how folks here weigh that new value against the higher prices. 

Questions:

• If you renew soon, are you planning to change tiers (Standard/Premium/Enterprise) or billing cadence (monthly/annual) to offset the increase? What’s your rationale? 

• Do the Team ’25 releases (e.g., Rovo/AI, Collections, admin improvements) feel like enough value to justify the price changes?

• For monthly customers, will maximum quantity billing change how you manage seat fluctuations during the month? Any playbooks for keeping peaks under control? 

• What practical tactics have actually moved the needle on spend — right-sizing seats, tightening SCIM de-provisioning, automation, or something else? (This is where our own user-management focus comes from, but I’m especially interested in what’s worked for you.)

If any vendor context feels off, happy to adjust.

PS: Here is my full Team25 Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPNpTBqIEK8

[Debbie Jolley]

We thankfully got our renewal quote earlier this week, just prior to the price increase - works quite well with our annual billing cycle.

For me personally, as the main admin (and a full time hands-on user) for our business, no I don't feel the price increases correlate to any so called improvements.

I've also always struggled with the pricing model that says the app pricing is tied to the tier you're on - eg 6 users of an app would still be charged at the full 500 user tier - makes some of the apps prohibitively expensive even though we know they'd fill a gap in the main product offering (which keeps getting more expensive and yet still doesn't include some fairly basic functionality).

Feels to me like Atlassian are chasing shiny new toys and users rather than improving the base product.

[Björn Döhler]

@Debbie Jolleythanks for the thoughtful reply - and nice timing getting the quote in before 15 Oct 2025. 

I hear you on the tiered app pricing pain. Paying at the 500-user band when 6 people actually need the add-on makes certain apps a non-starter. If Atlassian future supports true per-user-seat billing, I think a lot of admin decisions would look very different.  The truth will be, that app prices will change in a per-user-seat billing, because, as far as I know, most marketplace vendors are trying to harmonize this aspect (all users are licensed) in their current pricing.

On the value question, I get the frustration. Shiny new things grab stage time, while long-standing gaps linger. If you had to pick the two base-product fixes that would make the increase feel fairer for your team, what are they?

[Urmo]

As long as I’ve been using Atlassian products, there has been a price increase every year — and for me, that’s a natural thing. But yes, when you pay 300k this year and the same number of licenses will cost you 30k more next year, you’ll definitely notice it on your bill.

Every year Atlassian releases new, cool, and useful features, but most users probably never have time to fully adopt them. So it’s not really Atlassian’s problem — it’s the customers’. It’s like buying a minivan when all you need is a one-seat car.
Today we have the same issue: if you need Assets, you can’t get it with a Standard license — you have to upgrade to Premium. Maybe next year Assets will also be included in the Standard plan, or even be free for home users like me. I see Assets as a great way to build my own digital bookshelf to store my book list, but right now I have to pay over 50 euros per month just to use that feature.

As an Atlassian specialist, I see that most users are still transitioning from Excel to Jira, Assets, or Confluence, and during the first year, that’s all they really need. Later, as they grow, they start asking for more — and that’s when all the new features become valuable.
Looking at the long-term plan, Rovo has been on the market for about a year now. Probably by this time next year, it will make Atlassian users’ lives even easier, because there’s still a lot to build.

Of course, customers are never happy to pay more than they did last year. Meanwhile, Atlassian keeps growing and even sponsors an F1 team. As customers, we just need to demand more from Atlassian — to get the functionalities we feel are still missing from their products.

I think it’s very smart to get the maximum functionality out of Atlassian products, because that way your company can save on license costs — you won’t need to buy another product that does the same thing.

What’s interesting this year is that, in the past, there used to be some competition among Atlassian Partners over pricing. I could ask one partner and then another, and get the best offer. But now it seems that you’re “married” to one Solution Partner forever. I’d really like to see the days of price competition come back.

[Björn Döhler]

@Urmo , thanks - and yes, anyone staring at a +10% line item year over year will feel it.

 I agree that many teams under-adopt what they already pay for. But I’m not fully convinced that makes it purely a customer problem. Look at moviestreaming a few years back: prices crept up, content split across 3 or 4 services, and adoption stalled. Churn rose and piracy crept back. When value feels fragmented or hard to realize, people vote with change or?

On Atlassian, I think the adoption gap is a shared responsibility:

New features need faster time-to-value - cleaner defaults, opinionated templates, admin guardrails, and light training credits bundled into renewals. What I heard a lot last week was that the pace and continuous delivery of new things are challenging for many organizations. Many people also told me they would prefer to see this happening more in larger releases on a quarterly or semi-annual basis, with small improvements made in between. What are your thoughts on this?

Rovo and Collections look promising. If Rovo consistently reduces triage and search time by x percent and Collections actually removes app overlap, that’s tangible. But it has to show up in daily work, not just on stage. 

Curious what you saw at Team 25 that felt genuinely useful for the next 12 months. Was there a single announcement - Rovo improvements, Collections, CSM?