IMHO it would make sense to separate the global Jira license from the individual plugin purchases on user level. Currently, if you are using a yearly license for JIRA cloud, you are prevented from combining it with monthly payments for plugins. As each user might want to try or use different plugins (and even choose to pay for those on their own) it would surely benefit everyone:
- the users' companies would no longer be bottlenecks for getting new plugins, as everyone could choose to try or buy the ones they think are most beneficial to them (especially since the monthly cost would be low enough for individuals not to want to go through the whole cost approval process within their company for just a couple of dollars a month),
- plugin creators, as individual teams and people would buy licenses on their own accord (hopefully starting word-of-mouth about the good ones, thus increasing sales),
- Atlassian, as the availability of the market place would finally cater to the need of each individual user. Alongside excellent functionality of JIRA itself, teams and users would exchange their own JIRA best practices and plugin suggestion as everyone's experience of JIRA would be custom, and lastly
- The users, as everyone would be able to try out a plugin before they decide to buy it or persuade team members and colleagues to use them or pay for them as a yearly subscription package.
The incentive to get a yearly license for a plugin would then be possible through plugin pricing (yearly multiple user vs. monthly single user) rather than forcing users to pick the bare essential plugins for the teams and steer clear of the "nice to have" ones.
Best regards and thank you for taking it into consideration,
Robert Steiner