RFC:113 - Free App entitlements on Sandboxes

Hello Everyone!

Thank you for your engagement - we sincerely appreciate the thoughtful feedback. A common theme raised was the cost implications of supporting apps on Sandboxes. We hear your concerns, and I’m pleased to advise that for Runs on Atlassian apps, your Forge consumption bill will exclude any costs incurred by app usage on sandbox sites for Forge hosted apps. This change will come into effect at some point before April 1, when we will transition all customers from the Beta to GA . Any changes to this timeline will be communicated in advance.

Additionally, to address a few other points raised in this thread.

  • Terms of Service : The app installation flow on sandboxes mimics the experience in the production environment, which includes agreeing to the vendor’s terms of service.

  • Data Residency: Sandboxes, by default, are located in the same region as the production site but can be moved to a different region by the customer.

  • Ability to uninstall apps immediately: Our Marketplace team is actively working on the capability to providing customers with the ability to uninstall immediately without having to go through the “unsubscribe” flow that exists today.

  • Technical considerations for app purchases on sandbox (above the limit of 5): We are still working through the implementation details of the purchasing and will share an update in this area as we make further progress.

  • Rationale on limit on number of app instances: Five instances of the same app on sandboxes tied to a site covered the 99% percentile of customer usage during the feature’s beta.

  • Monitoring capabilities: The Marketplace Licenses API will have an installedOnSandbox field that you can query. Partners with apps on Forge remote can use this information to throttle app usage on sandboxes if they encounter high costs. Based on our observed usage during Beta, app usage on sandboxes account for less than 5% of total app usage. We recommend that you throttle sandbox app usage only if you observe sandbox costs to be more than 5% of the customer’s usage on production for a period of at least 3 months.

As part of our long-term strategy, we will continue to explore how app testing on sandboxes can unlock potential revenue opportunities for you, our partners, including, but not limited to, aligning future capabilities with app editions and considering consumption based pricing for sandbox app usage. We will share further updates through a separate RFC as we make progress.