Remove Free Trello to stop Guard consumption?

Question

Hello Atlassian Community,

I have a situation where multiple employees have signed up for Free Trello accounts with their company e-mail address in the past. We claim all accounts in our domain as managed accounts, to ensure SSO into our JSM customer portal. But because its a managed account with Trello, it now takes up a guard license.

None of these users are actually using Trello now but i have no way of getting rid of their Trello account. So now its taking up a Guard license for an account that's not used.

I don't want to deactivate their Atlassian account as they still need it for the JSM customer role.

Is there anything i can do? Or am i stuck with these accounts?

Rik de Valk (Brainboss) · Answer

Hi @Jeremy Wood  ,

I just wanted to add something about this topic. I understand the goal of cost efficiency and thus tryihg to reduce the Guard billing. But I often see that companies forget why they have Guard in the first place.

Guard's primary purpose is protect your organisations identities. So it makes sense that you pay for identities, even if these are not used on your own Atlassian sites; You also want to prevent that some john.smith@yourcompany.com is signing into some Bitbucket repo and Confluence site somewhere across the globe. Especially using basic authentication (for which they may have found the credentials on the dark web).

Also I think it is fair to ask your employees not to use their company identity for private purposes. There will also be legitimate (business) reasons to use a company identity to sign-in to a 3rd party Atlassian service (a partner, supplier or customer site). So you will always have an amount of identities in your Guard bill that are not users of any of your own Atlassian sites.

Not a solution to your problem. But I just wanted to highlight the security aspects of the matter.

Have a nice day.

Rik

Josh · Answer

Hi Jeremy, Mia's direction is the right one. To add the practical clicks so Guard stops counting those people without touching their JSM access:

* Find who still has Trello. In admin.atlassian.com > Directory > Managed accounts, export or filter users with Trello product access. Those are the Guard-billable ones for Trello.
* Remove them from every Trello workspace, including personal ones they created years ago. Guard Standard treats a managed user as billable for Trello while they remain a member of any Trello workspace. Workspace admins (or you, if you can open those workspaces) need to remove the member; leaving a Free workspace orphaned with them as the only admin is a common reason the seat never drops.
* Remove Trello product access on the user's Atlassian account (Directory > user > Products), once they're out of all workspaces.
* Do not deactivate the Atlassian account if they still need the JSM portal — portal access rides on that account.

After removal, allow a little time for billing/usage to refresh, then confirm on the Guard / product access screens that Trello no longer shows for them. If a user owns a personal workspace you can't enter, you may need them to delete it, or Atlassian support can help with orphaned personal workspaces on a claimed domain.

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Answer

Hello @Jeremy Wood

Managed accounts that access only the JSM Help Center aren't billable for Atlassian Guard Standard, so you don't need to deactivate them.

They trigger Guard billing solely by belonging to a Trello Workspace under their managed email. Because Org Admins cannot centrally remove users from personal or free Trello Workspaces, instruct the users to log in and leave or delete all Workspaces themselves. Once you remove their Trello memberships, their Guard billing drops to zero while their portal access remains active. Do not move them to a non-billable authentication policy if you require SSO for the portal, as non-billable policies disable SSO enforcement.

At the end, use App Request controls to restrict managed users from creating future Trello accounts.

Best,

Arek 🤠