Forge pricing update: Forge will remain free through 2025

Forge
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We recently shared an update on Forge pricing on the developer blog and wanted to share here as well. Forge will remain free until December 31, 2025, up to platform limits. This extends the previously announced Forge pricing for an additional year.

While we’re still evaluating the future Forge pricing model, we outlined some principles in the blog post that are guiding our decision making. There are:

  1. Optimizing for Forge Adoption
  2. Freemium model
  3. Aligning pricing to usage

Please give the blog post a read for more details.

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Atlassian already takes a 15-25% cut from all app sales.

In what bizarre universe would one ever charge additional fees for developers to use Forge? Absolutely shooting yourself in the foot. Truly a major incomprehension of the strategic purpose of an app marketplace.

Just eat the internal cost in that existing revenue share percentage. And if the accounting doesn’t work then you simply do not have the competitive capabilities to do infra in-house. You either need to restructure, cut costs and assess headcount, or outsource.

Frankly in the short-term it’ll help us existing vendors with less competition, but do you want to drive away developers to build apps that increase the holistic value of other faster growing platforms? :man_facepalming:

I’m sure Notion, Monday, ClickUp etc will happily offer developers a better deal. They appear to understand clearly that developers are an emergent value-add to their ecosystem more than they are a revenue channel:

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This recurring “Forge will remain free” annual announcement alone is enough to encourage new developers to go elsewhere.

“Hey new developer, build a Forge app! Oh btw some Atlassian PM has decided that ON TOP OF the 15-25% of gross sales they already take, they’re going to charge you an additional unspecified usage $fee in the who-knows-when future to host that app. But hey it’s free for one more year! Still interested in building a Forge app?”

I’d love to be a fly-on-the-wall in these internal meetings.

I bet that if Atlassian does bizarrely decide to charge for usage fees on Forge, it will be an order of magnitude more expensive than what developers currently pay to serve their Connect apps. And with zero infra choice there will be zero incentive structure for those prices to ever decrease, but plenty of incentive to ratchet them in perpetuity.

Forge is already measurably slower than external infra and far more unstable as evident by the current major outage:

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I currently serve millions of users with a TOTAL infra bill of ~$5/mth (genuinely) and far greater uptime than Atlassian has ever achieved. If Forge can’t beat what the open infra market already delivers you’ll obviously be f#%king over developers, particularly since by design there’s zero choice in infra provider on Forge.

I can safely predict that if Forge does charge usage fees in the future that I’ll be paying more to invoke/serve those apps than I do on paid inference API calls to the most advanced AI models on the planet. That inevitable day will be infuriating and embarrassing for this platform.

Charging developers (who are also your customers) to use $metered Forge infra when they literally have no choice in the matter would be deeply violating this core company value:

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Hi,

Basicallly, I’m supposed to understand the business risks with the current pricing model of Forge.
There are indeed items in Forge’s built-in services (AI, Storage, etc.), whose (transitive) pricing may change in the future and the costs also highly depend on actual usage.
As such, there is a variable part of the total costs, which is hard to count with (in advance), thus it can jeopardize Atlassian’s profits. That’s clear.

However, the same thing holds to be true in case of Marketplace partners, too, if they eventually should pay the piper.
Therefore, imho, if a sort of metered usage will ever be introduced, all of the extra costs should be directly passed on to the customers (but not to the vendors).
Apparently, customers will be ready to incur any variable expenses only if the pricing scheme is clear, transparent and commensurate to real operating costs.

Consequently, I’d not apply any changes to the current pricing model before all the supportive infrastructure and tooling is available to carry out the outlined (transitive pricing) concept.
I hope, you’re also considering these aspects of such a crucial change, while figuring out the best possible solution. If so, such details should be included in your official communication, otherwise it may create uncertainty among vendors and potential customers.

Best,
Márton

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I am also really anxious about this unpredictable pricing.

My apps have a lot of free tier 10 user installs.
As well as some very big free educational installs with 12,000 user tier.
All free for the customer. What will Atlassian charge me for those installations when forge storage is heavily used ….

Will Atlassian not charge Vendors the free/edu tiers of forge apps?

And also if charged for forge how can you be sure the charge is not higher than the actual revenue.

I would really love to see a very simple thing like: „forge apps cost another 5% on top of revenue share for infrastructure costs.“
That would be fair and there would be no unexpected cost explosions if an app would get a lot of use and high user tier.

I hope you really think this through.

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I do want to add to the discussion that we need to make sure to differentiate here between Developers (in-house) and Marketplace Partners

Developers do not contribute through a revenue share. I understand the reasoning behind usage fees for in-house developers.

Marketplace Partners do contribute through a revenue share. They currently have the benefit of being able to choose their infrastructure partner. This might change in the future, if Atlassian sunsets Connect. If that is the case, charging additional usage fees for a platform partners are forced to use whilst also taking a revenue share seems troublesome.

Forge has a mixed audience, and it would be great if Atlassian recognises that by defining a clear strategy on how to cater to these two specific groups.

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@remie, I fully agree with you. My proposal above addresses the production environments only, where end-customers generate all of the traffic. In case of dev and staging environments, no extra charges should come up at all, at least not within reasonable limits (normal use).

However, there is an area, where Atlassian has not yet given us clear guidance and means: load/performance testing. Forge apps may also need this feature, especially if Forge Remote is in place, dealing with a massive workload and/or large amount of data. I think, there should be defined and provided dedicated environments/sites for such purposes (having no interference with production environments and infrastructure). Whether they should and will infer further expenses (passed on to the Marketplace partner / developer) is still an open question. I’d argue that on the one hand it is also a kind of developer environment, on the other hand it may clearly generate higher traffic and thus falls into a different category. Nevertheless, at the end of the day it is optional (I mean, it is not mandatory to create that complex apps requiring performance testing, and if so, you can still decide whether and how you want to run those kinds of tests). Anyway, if any extra costs may still appear, they should not dissuade developers/vendors from doing these tasks and provide high quality apps/services.

Btw, in certain cases, the currently applied Forge platform limits cannot really serve normal use cases either. First, it should be also defined what are considered normal and extreme traffic, i.e. what we may call a performant app. The current state of the Forge platform does not really allow for the development and constant operation of more complex and scalable apps, even the simplest use cases may reach its limits.

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Appreciate the input in these comments - we’ll continue to have a conversation with Partners throughout the process of determining pricing. I do want to underline a few key points:

  • We expect Forge to have a generous free tier - Forge will remain free for the majority of apps.
  • We are taking into account partners’ total cost of participating in the Marketplace and this will be factored into future pricing.

As we progress, you can expect us to formally reach out to gather input from partners and customer developers using Forge.

Thanks.
Adarsh

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