Why Can’t I Change the User Permissions in my Free Account?

[#1]

We see this question quite a bit, so what’s going on? Free Subscriptions are by design by Atlassian to not allow updates to any permissions. I am sure you already realize there is a user limit for what is allowed for a Free site (10 users or less for Jira, 3 user (Agents) or less for Jira Service Management.

But if you have several users in under your Free Subscription plan, they will ALL be treated as if they are Jira Administrators. That means you can’t truly have security or separation of functions within this plan as you cannot grant Project Roles to users nor can you modify the Permission Scheme. 

Of course there are other limitations associated with Free plans which are detailed here: What is the Free Jira Cloud plan? But it is probably this situation with the lack of security and control of permissions that cause most users to “upgrade” to the Standard Subscription.

Workaround?

The next inevitable question – Is there no workaround for this? Well, like many things in Jira, the answer is Yes and No. One hack is to temporarily do a trial upgrade to the Standard Subscription and set permissions at that point. You can enjoy that for a time, but sadly, you will either need to pay at the end of the 30 days, or you’re threatened with losing your account for non-payment.

The solution? You revert back to the Free Plan. However, be aware that can have some unintended consequences. If you added users to a Project Role on a project and then downgrade to a Free account, the user gets locked into the project, and can’t be removed. The user can end up in a no man’s land with problems performing functions, even in the Free account.

The solution is to upgrade again to a Trial Standard or Premium subscription, correct the settings, and then downgrade back to Free. This is more of a pain that if you can just left everything open to begin with.

To change your subscription you can follow this guidance: https://support.atlassian.com/subscriptions-and-billing/docs/manage-your-bill-for-standard-and-premium-plans/#Changing-product-plan-from-Free-to-paid

Have you encountered any of these problems? Or others with the Free account? Let us know in the comments below.

[Matt Doar _Adaptavist_]

It's a pretty clever approach to a free instance - make it so every user can mess the configuration up! No-one will use that in production, surely.

[John Funk]

No argument there @Matt Doar _Adaptavist_ !

[dwichers]

I completely agree, and it’s quite frustrating. It’s not that I’m unwilling to pay for the service that Jira offers – in fact, Atlassian software is "shut up and take my money" good. The problem is, I want to add users who only need to perform basic tasks like adding, viewing, and commenting on issues, and maybe checking the status of issues on a board. These users are my testers or clients who help me check for bugs or request functions, which is the whole reason I need a project management system.

However, with the free plan, these users get access to everything. If I upgrade to limit their access, they count as accounts that I need to pay for. I wish the premium plan had a fixed monthly fee and charged per user only after the first 10 users (since the free plan offers 10 users at no cost). Alternatively, a pay-per-function model could be useful. I discovered that when adding a user on a premium plan, they also gain access to my entire Confluence account. To fix this, I need a separate subscription per user for Confluence on top of the subscription per user for Jira.

Plane.sounderstands this distinction better. They offer guest accounts that you can limit to just viewing the project (you can easily add them to a project instead of dealing with permission schemes), and they can add issues which you can then accept or deny. It’s a very cool workflow that makes me consider switching to their platform.