Cannot access Confluence to downgrade to Free plan after Premium trial auto-cancelled?

Question

"My Confluence Premium monthly subscription was auto-cancelled on June 27, 2026 after a free trial expired (Entitlement: E-44N9F7-6DP-RW9, site: vplatform.atlassian.net). I have 9 active users and qualify for the Confluence Free plan (≤10 users). The admin panel only gives me the option to reactivate at Premium for $132/month — there is no option to select Free. I do not want to pay for Premium. Please manually activate Confluence Free on my existing site so I do not lose my data and pages. I cancelled because we were over the user limit — we have now reduced to 9 users."

Barbara Szczesniak · Answer

@Hollywoodv Music Business See this page for the steps to downgrade: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/removing-users-and-downgrading-to-confluence-free/

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Hollywoodv Music Business

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

You will need to reactivate the subscription under the Premium plan initially. Then immediately downgrade to the Free subscription. If you do that immediately you should not be charged for any time on the Premium plan.

If you want to get confirmation that is the correct path, contact Atlassian Billing, Licensing & Pricing Support as soon as possible, as the data from an expired Trial will be deleted on the 15th day after deactivation.

Note that you will lose access to some functionality by downgrading from the Premium to the Free plan. For an overview of the differences refer to:

Confluence Pricing

Also be aware the Confluence Cloud Free can be deactivated by Atlassian if you leave it inactive for 40 consecutive days. For more information on that refer to this article I published recently:

Atlassian Jira/JSM/Confluence Free Tier Inactivity & Data Deletion Timeline

Viswanathan Ramachandran · Answer

Hi,

Since your site now has only 9 active users, you’re eligible for the Confluence Free plan.

Normally, you should see an option to downgrade to Free. If your admin portal only offers Reactivate Premium, this usually indicates a billing or entitlement issue that can’t be resolved from the Community.

Your existing site and data can often be preserved by Atlassian Support. I’d recommend opening a billing support request.

Contact Atlassian Billing Support as soon as possible while the cancelled subscription is still within the retention period. They can review the entitlement and, where applicable, manually move the site to the Free plan without requiring a new Premium subscription.

Regards

Viswa