Atlassian is #@!%-ing the Customer

Please Forward This Article to Your Jira Admins

I’ve been using Jira for more than 15 years. I like using it. I’m not in team ‘I fucking hate Jira’. Every company I’ve worked for as an employee used it, and only now I’ve started working as an independent consultant have I experienced some of the alternative tools that are out there.

Yes, Jira has many short-comings. It’s slow, and all the differences between company-managed and team-managed projects are extremely annoying. Also, Atlassian doesn’t really understand Scrum or Kanban (but hey, I don’t know a single popular issue tracker that does).

Since I’ve been working with Jira for so long, I mostly know how to circumvent these problems, and let’s get real: all tools have problems. If you don’t know the problems of your tool, you just don’t know the tool all that well.

I like working with Jira. There, I said it.

It’s better than most tools out there (looking at you: Rally, Azure DevOps… BLEGH!). However, it’s not all sunshine and roses in the world of Jira.

I recently read a book where Atlassian (the company behind Jira) was praised for having strong company values. Here are their five company values in their full glory:

Core Values | Atlassian

I’m going to call B.S. on these strong company values using a disturbing real-world example.

Jira: Charging Customers Per Invited User

When you use Jira, you pay per invited user. Yes, invited user. You read that correctly, it’s pretty unbelievable right?

If you invite them, and never accept. You’re still paying for that user.

If you invite a user, screw up, and send another invite. You’re now paying for two users. It doesn’t matter if either of them is accepted.

If you forget to remove any unaccepted invite, you’re paying in perpetuity (until you churn as a customer).

You might be thinking: Maarten, you’re bullshitting. That can’t be true. Let me show you what Atlassian writes in their own documentation:

“For monthly subscriptions, we offer per-user pricing. When users are added to a product, they’re automatically counted towards billing even if they don't accept your invite or log in. We’ll charge the card on file each month for the number of users tied to your product subscription.” - Atlassian Documentation, Manage Users and User Tiers

I’m now going to argue, how this functionality completely conflicts with 4 out of the 5 company values of Atlassian.

1. Don’t #@!% the Customer

I’ve talked to experienced Jira practitioners and many companies that use Jira. In these conversations, two things stand out:

1. Most Jira experts are unaware that they are charged for invites that are never accepted.

2. Most companies are unaware that they are charged for invites that are never accepted.

To make matters worse, Jira doesn’t allow you to filter on the following:

• Inactive users

• Date last logged in

• Invited users.

You can filter on active users, but that’s about it. The only way to get rid of unaccepted invites and people who are not logging in, is to go through every page in your list of users, and painstakingly check each row, and take action.

This doesn’t happen, so Atlassian goes KA-CHING. There is a word for this: Dark UX. It comes across as a design pattern deliberately created to trick or manipulate users into NOT taking action.

It’s called being greedy at the cost of the customer, in short: they definitely are #@!%-ing the customer, because few of them know they are being charged for ghost users.

Charging for invited users is like asking customers to donate to a charity that doesn’t exist and they’re not even aware they’re donating. Read that sentence again, and doesn’t it leave you with the feeling you’re being scammed?

Now that brings us to the next Atlassian value I’d like to discuss: Build with Heart and Balance.

2. Build with Heart and Balance

Asking customers to pay for uninvited users, is not building with heart and balance. It’s shooting your customers in the foot, and asking them to be happy with it.

It’s the sign of an unbalanced relationship: where one side can get away with screwing the other party. A company that builds with heart and balance, would never release a feature that asks customers to pay for every invited user. It’s the epitome of building with calculated greediness and lack of balance.

3. Open Company, No Bullshit

‘Openness is root level for us’, that’s clearly not true, because your customers and experienced practitioners often don’t know that you’re charging per invited user. This is the sign of a closed company AND bullshit.

Let’s end with the final and fourth conflicting value: Be The Change You Seek, and with our conclusion.

4. Be The Change You Seek

The fourth value brings us hope. Atlassian, it’s time to put your money where you mouth is: be the change you seek.

Asking customers to pay for invited users, is like asking them do donate to a charity that doesn’t exist and they’re not even aware they’re donating.

It’s that absurd. Charging per invited user conflicts with most of your company values, and it should be reverted.

We all make mistakes, and it’s time to take action. Do the right thing, don’t just put your company values on your website and pretend you live and breathe them.

Paying per invited user sticks out like a sore thumb and all it signals is that you’re greedy and don’t really care about being fair to your customers. The good news is that you can easily fix it.

Don’t be greedy, and do the right thing. I’ll happily adjust this article if paying for invited users is removed.

But until then, my point stands. Please forward this article to your Jira administrators so they can save money.