Today I was wandering what would be the cost of upgrading our company's JIRA to v7. I've noticed, that renewal of our maintenance/upgrades period would cost 16000$ and it would extend the period only to may 2016. It seems that renewal must cover whole time from the last expiration date. That means we have to pay 8000$ to extend our maintenance period from may 2014 to may 2015... yes, pay 8000$ FOR NOTHING!, and then pay another 8000$ to extend it from may 2015 to may 2016, just to get five months of upgrade/maintenace for 16000$...
Am I the only one that thinks this is insane? Forcing a client to pay for service, that never happened seems like a fraud. Current pricing model is set purely to force you to stay on the update/maintenance period.
Why should we stay on the active maintenance? During our maintenance period we have tried support maybe 4-6 times. And less then half of responses were helpful. As a medium company, with quite large JIRA instance with a lot of plugins, we don't need and we don't want to waste time and resources for frequent JIRA upgrades. Upgrading JIRA costs a lot of time, and usually it breaks something, that costs even more time to fix. It is cheaper for us to stay a long period of time on one, stable version of Jira, and switch to newer version if it has new features worth the price. If we don't need maintenance, and we don't need to upgrade JIRA more than once in 1-2 years, therefore it is not cost-effective for us to keep our maintenace up and pay 8000$ per year for nothing.
I have counted the costs per month of renewal of expired maintenance period:
license_cost_2.png
Cost of buying new JIRA license for our tier is 18000$, and you get 12 months of upgrades/maintenance, therefore the cost of one month is 1500$. To be fair I have averaged the cost of renewal per month to new expiration with cost of keeping the maintenance up (8000$/year=666$/month) to average of full 12 months, so it could be compared to buying new license. (chart that counts only active months left after renewal looks far worse: http://s3.postimg.org/3y5oqhyz7/license_cost.png). Basically any renewal cost per month that is higher than cost of new license ($1500/month) is a no-go zone.
It seems that if you your maintenance expired more than 14 months ago IT IS CHEAPER TO BUY NEW JIRA LICENSE! Considering that it allows you to have two legal JIRA instances - one with old, and one with new version - I would say that "green zone" shrinks no more than 12 months...
After counting above, I'm pretty sure that the person, who is responsible for the current pricing model clearly doesn't know what he's doing. This pricing model ENCOURAGES large companies, that cannot take risk of destabilization of system by frequent upgrading, to stay as long as possible on one version of Jira.
There is even more to that: JIRA constantly releases new versions, but the core features still have the same flaws that have had 10 years ago. Sure, Atlassian right now have one-of-a-kind product on the market, and whole policy is based on the fact that clients have no alternative to switch to. However that might quickly backfire if some new player, backed up by large investor, will appear on the market. People will turn their backs on JIRA in no time. So far the ONLY strength of JIRA is the large palette of addons developed by external companies. It is sad to look how this large potential of JIRA is wasted by the crazy marketing policy...
