We are a small nonprofit that had been using Server for our Confluence and Jira instances. When Server was announced to be on its way out with no word on nonprofit pricing, we like many nonprofits were worried that we would be forced out. But in 2021, Atlassian made this post https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Data-Center-articles/Introducing-Data-Center-Community-licenses/ba-p/1539124 where they claimed that they were "introducing free Data Center Community subscriptions (covering both product and Marketplace apps)". It was a great relief to us. We initially believed that this program would operate similarly to how it did for Server and how it currently does for Cloud, we being able to automatically add discounted Marketplace apps to our account. But after migrating to Data Center we found that we could not automatically add discounted apps and were only given the option to purchase at full price. We submitted a ticket to Atlassian to get more info and a support rep informed us that for Data Center we would need to request each Marketplace app to get community pricing.
We followed the Atlassian rep's instructions and submitted a request from the form they linked us https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/community-license-request#/ . At the bottom of the form they have a section for "Which apps do you want to include in your Community license request". We selected what apps we rely on for our Confluence and Jira instances and submitted the request. However, when an Atlassian rep responded to our request we were then told that they "are unable to offer Community licensing for Data Center applications," and attached a quote for $202k to use our 11 apps for a single year. We were frankly shocked. We are a small nonprofit and that sum is twice as much as our entire annual tech budget. We followed up with this rep and they said, "I must inform you that Data Center applications are no longer eligible for a non-profit discount. However, you might be able to obtain promo codes to help mitigate the cost directly from the vendor of the applications". When was this change made between the forum post in 2021 to now? Where was it announced? We checked on Marketplace vendor pages and many FAQs for nonprofit pricing still link to the above form with no mention of contacting them directly for promo codes.
Following Atlassian's suggestion, we contacted a Marketplace vendor. The vendor we reached out to was also not aware of this policy change. They were still under the impression that nonprofit discounts for Marketplace apps were automatically granted when approved for an Atlassian community license, thus they had no promo code. So, again, how did Atlassian announce this change? Did they tell vendors? What are we supposed to do at this point? We rely on these addons but there's no possible way for us to purchase these addons at full price, let alone pay the renewal every year. It increasingly feels like a bait and switch to get us to migrate to Data Center and then force us to Cloud.
