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Atlassian Marketplace - Changes Must Be Made (please read and share your feedback)

Martin

I have been a Confluence administrator for a large organisation for 5 years. I was hired to tidy up their huge environment which they have been using for many years.

When the environment was first installed, many of the plugins on the Atlassian Marketplace was free, The engineer installed a handful of those tools to meet business requirements. We also purchased a handful of tools alongside those.

Over the years our page authors have been using macros from the free plugins. We have become reliant on those to display and organise our content. If we uninstall the plugin, information is greatly affected and we are not able to get it back unless we reinstall the tool.

As someone who needs to justify spending to their finance department, I feel trapped every time one of those free plugins change to a paid licence. Some drastically go up by such a huge percentage. We really do feel trapped when this happens especially when you compare our annual cost with Atlassian from 5 years ago.

It forces me into making difficult decisions to either waste endless resources, training and effort to get all our page authors to take off those macros from potentially thousands of pages or force us into purchasing the products. Either way, it requires a lot of planning with management.

I strongly believe Atlassian now need to start protecting their customers from vendors on the Atlassian Marketplace. I understand why vendors need to change their licencing plan but they need to set the expectation from the very beginning and make it clear.

Here is what I believe must change to start protecting your customers:

If a vendor releases a free plugin, they must keep it free for life. If there is a need to start charging for the plugin to meet customer demand, the free tool must become a lite version with no new features made for that tool. Only security and support updates for future versions should be required.
Atlassian *must* make it very clear to customers that plugins aren't guaranteed to remain free for life. A warning must be presented notifying them of this to give them the choice to commit to using that tool.
Atlassian *must* give their customers a way to easily take content from a wrapped macro so that it isn't hidden with the 'Unknown Macro' content.

Just these simple changes will make a huge difference.

Take a look at the below photos. There is no where to say the licence could change for that free plugin. It could increase by over 1000% in 2/3 years time when your customers become reliant on it:

(I have removed vendor information as it is not targeted against a specific company)

Screenshot 1.png Screenshot 2.png

Any way I would love to hear other peoples thoughts on this.

Comments

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Hmm. There's a lot of things in there you have not thought through.

If a vendor releases a free plugin, they must keep it free for life.
- Why? If you insist on it, then you're effectively telling people who volunteer to write plugins to be your slave. If you imposed that rule, no-one would ever write anything for free, which completely stymies all forms of innovation.
Atlassian *must* make it very clear to customers that plugins aren't guaranteed to remain free for life.
- It's in the T&Cs for marketplace
Atlassian *must* give their customers a way to easily take content from a wrapped macro so that it isn't hidden with the 'Unknown Macro' content.
- Click "edit" on the page. The content is there.

You yourself say

I understand why vendors need to change their licencing plan

Great, so you do understand the need for change (which obviates most of what you've said here)

but they need to set the expectation from the very beginning and make it clear.

So you're not reading the announcements vendors are required to make when they change from free to paid. I guess there's a presentation issue here in that they're not as easy to find as you'd like, but they are there.

Kris G _Alacriz_

Here's my feedback:

1. It would certainly help if the app vendors make it obvious (or send an email) before their future paid versions are released.

2. Not sure if we already have this functionality somewhere but it would help if there is a reminder from every app vendor before a trial/free license expires and how many free trials they still have left.

3. Also, I was thinking if Atlassian can come up with the idea of "a bundle of licenses" and charge users in bulk for all their licenses and all of them applied as a single key in a single place (all co-termed) rather than having to maintain so many with different dates (applicable to Server and DC)

Matthew Stublefield

I'm not positive because I haven't been through the process myself, but I have an app on the marketplace and my understanding is that, if someone wanted to go from free to paid, they have to send a notification to everyone who has it installed and it's either 30 or 60 days before the switch happens. That's part of Atlassian's requirements, and they actually have the control/switch--the vendor submits a request, the notifications are sent, and X days later, Atlassian makes the switch on the vendor's behalf.

But I suspect most people are like me and have a filter setup in their mailbox were a lot of announcements get shunted to a folder and they never look at them XD

To your 3rd point @Kris G _Alacriz_ , a partner can do that for you to some extent. It's not a single key, but they can co-term and bill all at once.

Disclaimer: I work for Adaptavist and Atlassian Software Licensing is part of what we do. We have built some custom tools that help us do it quickly and efficiently, which help us handle large numbers of licenses quickly.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Most vendors do contact people in my experience, often months before we need to worry.
The marketplace is the place to do that, as it handles the licences, not asking thousands of vendors to each have to do something. But the marketplace doesn't send reminders (becase when it was tried a few years ago, 99% of the people getting emails either ignored them or treated them as spam). Frankly though, if you've forgotten how many trials you have left, you're either not interested enough to renew it or you're failing to do your job as an admin/system-owner.
There's no way to do single keys or bundles - you'd need the vendors to agree on all the pricing and terms across the board, which simply won't happen. The co-terming thing is possible of course, but Atlassian have never really gone for it, preferring to let partners offer that instead of implementing it themselves.

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