JPD Free plan: Project access level changes

[#1]

Announcement for customers of the Free plan of JPD

Currently, Jira Product Discovery allows all customers to select the project access level (private, open or limited access)

If your site is on the Free plan, as of November 15th, 2024, everyone with creator product access will be a project admin. It will not be possible to change the access permission scheme.

We're making the following specific changes to the project access level:

1. Existing projects in sites on the Free plan: Current free site admins won't be able to change the settings after 15th November.

2. New projects in free sites: the default access level will be set to "open," allowing everyone to access the project. 

These changes are intended to align JPD with the rest of Jira, where customers on the Free plan do not have the option to choose a project access level

If you switch from the Standard plan to the Free plan, the project permissions will be locked in their current state. To change them, you will need to upgrade back to the Standard plan.

Our Free plan is for small teams of fewer than 3 creators who may be just getting started with JPD, hence why we are changing the permissions. To take advantage of project permission management features, upgrade your plan.

[Dave Mathijs]

Alignment across products seems logical. However, an in-product pop-up warning would be nice to draw attention to this current state lock-in. Many JPD admins are not aware of this consequence when switching from a Standard or Premium plan to a free plan. This may lead to confusion and upgrading back is not that obvious.

[Adrian.Lester]

Does this mean all contributors in a project in effect become creators?

[Jet]

@Dave Mathijs The in-product popup warning has also been implemented :) This post provides further detail to what we are communicating in-product.

[Jet]

@Adrian.Lester no, not all contributors become creators. It means that every user with a site-creator role get a project-creator role on every project

[Erinn Capozzi]

If a project access is changed to "Open" it says "Everyone can open the project, any user with product access can act as a creator".  

If I am on the free plan, does everyone mean Everyone who has access to my JIRA including those with access to Service Desk Management (i.e. customers?).  

My specific case is one Discovery project currently, with 1 creator and 2 contributors.  I'd like to add more contributors to the project but we're still learning and our team is small. 

 When this change happens does it mean that the 2 contributors become creators? 

Mainly I am making sure we do not expose our discovery board to customers and we don't get charged for Discover for every user who has  JIRA account? 

Many thanks!

[Jet]

hi @Erinn Capozzi no, rest assured, it means that all users with creator product access role get a project admin role.

You can still have unlimited collaborators, they won't get charged.

We realised that this is not clearly written in the modal, so we are re-writing the content inproduct. I've also uploaded a new screenshot to this article.

Hope that this clarifies it for you.

[Steph Pretorius]

I just created a new project and can't add any contributors - how do I fix this?

[Michiel Schuijer]

So,

everyone with creator product access will be a project admin. It will not be possible to change the access permission scheme.

Fine, makes sense to me.

But the part:

We're making the following specific changes to the project access level:

* Existing projects in sites on the Free plan: Current free site admins won't be able to change the settings after 15th November.

* New projects in free sites: the default access level will be set to "open," allowing everyone to access the project. 

Does not make sense to me.

Sure, it is the same behaviour as with a Free Jira tier, but for existing customers, especially long-standing ones, this is another disappointment and blocker to try a new product.

Scenario:

A Jira customer with many software projects and external customers they collaborate with on those projects. That same customer wants to try out Jira Product Discovery for internal teams only, and suddenly they are faced with the fact that all JPD projects will be visible to their external customers who they collaborate with as well, because it is only possible to change access levels with the paid plan.

This does not look very customer-friendly to me. JPD is not something that is all too quickly trialled and accepted as a cost by management, so it may take 3 - 6 months to trial it properly, and sometimes even longer because the product is so new and still finding it's place with features still coming out, and so on.

Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but with everything becoming more expensive nowadays, I don't see the reason to hide every little feature behind a paywall. I think that actually works counter-productive, and makes companies look elsewhere for tools/solutions and less likely to invest in (new) features/products and higher subscription tiers.