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? 
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:
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:
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:
