Let us take a look at what the GUI tells us when you are in Bitbucket and you go to check the plans to see if you want to upgrade.

Nowhere on this screen does it say that there is a minimum number of users that you have to pay for. This view suggests that there is no such limit at all, which is what would make sense, as there is no reason to set a limit to the number of users for a product like Bitbucket.

This is where I think you should show the expected cost for a plan change. In fact, I believe this is even mandatory, legally, in many countries as you are now not being honest about the cost, and you are basically scamming the users into paying a lot more than expected. In fact, for me, this jumped up 5 times because I just wanted the standard for myself to use on this website.

So what does the Bitbucket pricing page say?

Again this says $3.65 per user per month and nowhere can you find the information that there is a minimum number of 5 users that you have to pay for. They have purposely added 5 users to the pricing table, which technically makes this value true, as it is $3.65 per user if you select 5 users. For a total of $18.25, even for just one user.

The ONLY place I have found where the actual pricing and the requirement that you have to pay for a minimum of 5 users are found is on the pricing FAQ, which is a tiny side link in Bitbucket in the overview page:

This tiny link is also available on the Bitbucket pricing page in the FAQ, but not under a section you would expect, but under the section on over usage:

On that page that you can find if you are really, really, really looking for it and explore all links, then you will find the following information:

This kind of practices to hide costs in the hopes that someone will miss that the monthly cost is many times higher is just a bad look for Atlassian. For me as an Atlassian fan who happen to love the functionality of Bitbucket and Bitbucket pipelines, this is a huge turn-off. Not just that I have to pay almost as much to use Bitbucket standard than I do for Jira premium, which is priced at $18.30 per user and month, but the fact that they are using omitting that on the pricing pages by using dark pattern design to trick us...

I will use the free version, as there is zero reason for me to pay that much for the standard functionality. This will also 100% prevent me from getting the software collection unless they will have a pricing that will work for me as a single user, or a team smaller than 5.

I am disappointed to say the least.

The problem as described back in 2007

Problem Definition

JIRA-1100 introduced editable comments. This is great. When our security officer reviewed the feature he wanted access to the change history, which would be important in the event of a security audit. It appears that there is no way to view comment history.

Suggested Solution

The ability to view comment change history. Ideally, this would be implemented such that a new permission was added 'View comment change history' so that its implementation could be configured at the site level.

How Atlassian handled these tickets

On October 13th the first ticket, which is for Cloud, was closed for this request, after 17 years (!) with no action taken. You can see the ticket here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-12400

This was followed up with a corresponding closure of the ticket for Server and Data Center a few days later on October 17th. That ticket can be found here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-12400

This is bad for all forms of audit or control of content

Not only is this a devastating blow towards companies that need this to maintain audit trails for what happens inside a ticket or task, but it is also one of the many reasons why you should never use Jira as a requirement tool. Without the ability to actually trace what happens in a ticket or task, you can never use it in any form of legal context as the content is not tracked with change logs.

It is a bit strange that Atlassian do not want to implement this as this is already in place for Description and pretty much any other field that exist in Jira. It seems it is ONLY the comments field where this is not added (please correct me if there are other fields). So why is it so hard to implement for comments?

One thing that is being referenced is that there are permissions related to comments and because you have comments internally and externally there could be situations where you do not want the original content to show in a change log. This makes no sense to me because the change log already should have this built in because there are other areas that also have permissions connected to them, and they don't seem to have any issues.

It is not hard to add permission data to content such as a change log to ensure the changes are seen only by people that should be able to see it. It is also not difficult to add another permission for who can see the change log for comment changes.

Atlassian is just not interested in changing unsexy things like comments as they want to build new cool features instead. This is quite obvious from the many tickets never being touched that relates to basic functionality that should be standard in an enterprise platform.

No traceability for comments, so what?

I see this comment a lot in those tickets as well. Why do we need to keep track of what is written in the comments anyway, who cares? Well, there are actually many use cases for this.

For Jira Service Management it is not uncommon that support agents, or customers send sensitive data in comments, even though they should not. This could for example be a password or a token used in a product. If there is a breach, and it leads to a legal situation, then obviously you need to be able to see if a support agent is at fault or not. If all you see if that a comment has been edited, but not in what way, this can cause an issue.

Yes, you can dig this up in the mail logs and customer notification logs, but only if they are still available and if it is possible to retrieve them. In some cases a ticket might even be moved to another project if there is no proper escalation process and then the content of the ticket changes, and it is even harder to find the emails and customer notifications will not even exist for that ticket in the new project.

It can also be that you have claims of insult or inappropriate behavior in the comments and if you are in a Jira project and this was some time back, then it will be hard to find in the logs and to know what was actually written.

In some cases people are using comments as a requirement field (yes, I know that this is borderline insanity, but it happens). In that case you might have serious issues with contracts if the requirements change with no traceability of what or when. This is also true if you use comments for approvals (again, very bad practice) and a hundred other things that take place in the comments.

What can you do to mitigate this?

If you really need this then you are basically forced to either buy an app or be very creative with automations and custom fields.

There is an app called Issue History for Jira that is listed in the comments in one of these tickets and with this you can see all kind of activities that happens in a ticket. This app is not exactly free, and it is a bit puzzling to me as to why this is not bought up by Atlassian and placed into the core Jira product.

If you want to take the "free" route then you can try to create an automation that save comments on create and also make new saves based on comments edited. It would probably be best to add this to Assets since you will basically see a doubling of content and then any changes on top of that, so you will have quite a lot of entries added. Just consider the new consumption based pricing for Assets which will make that solution as expensive or not more compared to an app...

Conclusion: Atlassian does not care about legal requirements, unless they have to?

Ignoring a real legal requirement that many users have is bad, and it does not look good on a company that claim to be an Enterprise solution. Leaving this open for 17 years and in that time they must have reworked the comments functions dozens of times and still they did not put any perceivable efforts into adding a basic functionality such as traceability for customer communication?

I am sorry, but that is just sloppy and a blatant disregard for legal requirements that their users face globally today.

This feels like a clear breach of Don’t #@!% the customer.

Why are Atlassian doing this?

I do not claim to know the reasons, but you do not have to be a genious to see the pattern of all the changes Atlassian are doing to Assets and other products. To me it seem clear that the Atlassian Cloud platform is lacking scalability and because scalability is not a part of the products non-fucntional requirements it is not top of mind when developing. As the services start to suffer from performance issues you can either rebuild for scale, or add limitations on the use of the product.

Atlassian seems to focus on limitations rather than fixing the underlying issues as we see a large number of restrictions like number of issues in a board, number of issues you can bulk change and now how many Asset objects you can have.

Does it make sense to limit Assets this way?

Limiting an Assets product with how many asset objects you can have makes no sense at all. The number of objects simply refers to how much space you occupy in a database. Nothing nore.

Having 10.000 objects or 100.000.000 objects is irrelevant in that regards because it is only storage and storage is very, very cheap.

What becomes taxing is when you need to query data and then the number of objects does not really matter, it is the relations that needs to be presented when you look at objects and work with objects that can cause issues. This is what requires processing power and what can cause databases to lock up if not designed properly.

As I know some of the people that built Insight back in the day and I have talked to them about the architecture, the original product that was built for Server and DC do not have these issues, so this seems to be a cloud product problem.

Atlassian claim this will allow funding to build a better product

Quote

These changes align with the value these capabilities have already brought to customers and will allow us to invest more resources into innovation and scale.

I call BS on this. Atlassian is trying to spin this as us paying more will allow Atlassian to invest more time and money to make assets a better product. The thing is that Assets is not sold separately and we already must pay for Jira Service Management premium to get access to Assets. So we are already paying extra to get Assets.

We are also getting the short end of the stick because Atlassian is failing to build at scale, or because they are getting greedy and try to milk us for more money anyway they can.

Either way they are #@!% the customer.

Should you use Assets in 2024?

Full disclosure here: I absolutely love Assets. I have loved it since I first saw it in Riadas office when it was just a newborn product and I use it every day with much delight. It is to me an amazing product that I love to use and that I would use privately as well if it was more affordable.

That being said I would not recommend anyone to use Assets today.

The number of restrictions imposed these last 12 months alone is enough to discourage anyone from investing in a tool that constantly deteriorate in functionality. I have never seen a product continously be reduced in value instead of having more value added to it. Assets is to me unique in that way.

Adding a ridiculously low limit like 50.000 asset objects tells me that Atlassian either don't understand Asset management at all, or they are going to reduce this number further in the future to make it fully consumption based. Either way it is cause for serious concern for anyone looking for a solid asset management tool.

The fact that there are upper limits of 2 million objects has already made some companies look elsewhere and this is going to make this situation even worse.

Is Assets dead, or is there hope?

Sadly I think this killed Assets.

Unless Atlassian announces a significant upgrade to Assets very quickly, I don't see any serious company investing in Assets as it is simply in decline functionality-wise and now they have to pay double for it. There are other solutions out there that are better alternatives long term as apps don't tend to loose functionality, unless imposed by Atlassian.

I think that for companies that see asset management as an important part of their business, which many do, they will look towards other tools like ServiceNow and then the question is where do Atlassian stand compared to ServiceNow in other areas such as incident management and product life cycle management...

I think that Assets only real place these days are on Data Center, at least for now. For cloud I would start looking at other options. Personally I am looking at Starhive as it is built by the creators of Insight, which is now assets. I talked to them recently and I think they will be interesting to follow as they have all the experience and expertise to build a far better product.

They also understand asset management so they build for scale and without BS limitations to hide a flawed product.

• Open company, no bullshit
• Build with heart and balance
• Don’t #@!% the customer
• Play, as a team
• Be the change you seek

Openness is root level for us. Information is open internally by default and sharing is a first principle. And we understand that speaking your mind requires equal parts brains (what to say), thoughtfulness (when to say it), and caring (how it’s said).

“Measure twice, cut once.” Whether you're building a birdhouse or a business, this is good advice. Passion and urgency infuse everything we do, alongside the wisdom to consider options fully and with care. Then we make the cut, and we get to work.

Customers are our lifeblood. Without happy customers, we’re doomed. So considering the customer perspective - collectively, not just a handful - comes first.

We spend a huge amount of our time at work. So the more that time doesn’t feel like “work,” the better. We can be serious, without taking ourselves too seriously. We strive to put what’s right for the team first – whether in a meeting room or on a football pitch.

All Atlassians should have the courage and resourcefulness to spark change – to make better our products, our people, our place. Continuous improvement is a shared responsibility. Action is an independent one.

Quote

These are the values that guide our business, our product development, and our brand.
As our company continues to evolve and grow, these five values remain constant.
 

Are they still living according to these Values?

Well, Atlassian slip up from time to time, and that is when we pick up the proverbial pen and add a post here to call them out on it. Unfortunately, Atlassian seems to be in a growing phase and with their work from anywhere policy things are slipping through more and more lately. We see more bugs being shipped to customers and more and more bad practices of greed and bad quality products happening.

So let us call them out on it and make sure the Atlassian we all have grown to love and admire does not lose their way, but stick to their values.

This website is what you will find many people link to when people ask for how to get a demo of Jira Align.  The page have nothing of value, and the only way to access the so-called Demo Center is to fill out your contact information. This is what is known as a honey trap. A page designed for the sole purpose of gathering contact information for sales and marketing purposes.

If you fill this form in, then all you will get is a list of videos of Jira Align. The worst part is that these videos are all available on YouTube as well as on the videos tab of the Atlassian Align section of the Atlassian Community. So providing information on this page will give you nothing of value.

This is not consistent with the Atlassian values and I think this website should be taken down. Whoever decided that creating honey traps to #@!% the customer, should read up on the Atlassian values because this page is a stinker!

Do you agree or disagree? Write a comment and let us know.

This seems to become a norm for Atlassian lately, to hide information and prevent comparison. I don't like it and I don't like the direction Atlassian is taking in terms of communication and information in the last few years. Atlassian used to be good and open about their prices, but lately it feels that they are doing everything they can to obfuscate and hide information purposely.

I am not sure if that is because they have a strategy to adopt dark patterns in their UX to prevent a clear view into the actual costs (like airlines do), or if it is just some bad practice on their part implemented by someone who don't understand the customers.

For example, why not include the new pricing in the email you send out to the customers? You know what products the customer own as it is part of your database, so it is not rocket science to add customized templates based on product ownership. If people could do that 15 years ago when sending out printed catalogs that had your car and your color on the front page, then I am sure that Atlassian can set up a simple database that can send targeted content to product segments.

Even if you can't because you have not done the work, or your master data is crap, you can still send the entire pricing table, or at least link to it!  Instead, you send out a letter that say nothing with a link to a page that does not have the pricing information I am looking for.

Not even the FAQ landing page that Atlassian link to have a link in the text or any form of directional que to the single most important question clients will have when landing here: What are the new prices. Sure, there is a link component to the left, but nothing that indicate that these are related to the new pricing structure. It's just sloppy and poor UX in my opinion.

Once you click in to see the pricing tables, you would expect to see the new prices and the old one for comparison, right? Nope. Atlassian shows only the new prices. If you are anything like me, then you never really pay attention to the actual price per tier, you know your monthly cost, right? So it would be nice with a place to see your new cost based on the new prices... but nope. You just have to wait for the next bill to see what the new price might be.

As you can see, the start plans are going to be shafted once more. So if you have one, hold on to it because it looks like they will increase the price on that tier with 750%.

Now, it is not very difficult to present the information on the increase in a more useful way. Just add the information on both the old and new price, along with the changes in both value and percentage. This is what Jira Cloud Standard looks like, for example, if you spend 2 minutes on it:

I think this could be a problem because the person in charge of the INFORMATION is a designer used to work with PRESENTATION. Having tables that look good is one thing, answering the questions of the people looking for answers is another. If you present new prices that will affect people's decision to remain a client or not, then you better do better than this Atlassian.

This was not good, so step it up.

Ok?