I am hoping to get your attention regarding Atlassian’s unannounced accounting change that will soon start to negatively impact partner revenue. I suspect that this change is also not in line with GAAP, since it will force vendors to redo revenue that has been already recognized on the vendor’s financial statements from previous accounting years.
Since the dawn of the Marketplace in 2012, Atlassian has always treated subscription upgrades as atomic transactions, where the customer is billed the difference between the old and the new tier prices. The difference is then remitted to the vendor, less Atlassian’s discount share.
Since the migration to CCP, these upgrade transactions are no longer atomic. Instead of having a single “upgrade” transaction, the CCP issues a complete refund of the old tier and then an upgrade to the new tier, with the latter being a complete rebilling of the entire amount of the new subscription price (not just the difference). Currently, this works out to the same net payment to the vendor.
However, this will change starting in 2026 due to Atlassian’s revenue share updates. I predict that a lot of major apps will be unable to migrate off Connect by 2026-01-01, which means that the Atlassian revenue share is increasing for many top-selling apps from 15% to 20% (and later 25%).
Your Marketplace team recently confirmed that the “refund” part of this transaction is refunded at the prior-year Atlassian discount rate, but the “new” part of the transaction will be billed at the current Atlassian discount rate, which will be 5% or 10% higher than before. This occurs despite the fact that the money was, in fact, still previously received by Atlassian from the customer during the period with the lower discount rate.
This creates an accounting nightmare, because the CCP is now pretending that this revenue (which was received and accounted for in years past) is actually new revenue, and it consequently applies the new (and higher) revenue share to revenue that was previously received and paid.
As a simple example, suppose that a customer purchases an app where the future part of the subscription totals $1,000 gross at 15% discount. In 2026, the customer upgrades that subscription to a higher tier valued at $1,100 gross, but with 25% Atlassian discount.
The net result of the upgrade transaction is that the vendor owes Atlassian money for the “upgrade”.
There is $100 of new revenue from the customer, but Atlassian sticks $125 in its own pocket by taking everything that the customer just paid, and then Atlassian further takes previously-paid revenue away from the vendor:
Original transaction:
Gross price: $1,000
Atlassian share @ 15%: $150
Vendor share @ 85%: $850
CCP upgrade transaction:
Atlassian first refunds the earlier sale and takes $850 away from the vendor, then:
Gross price: $1,100
Atlassian share @ 25%: $275
Vendor share @ 75%: $825
Vendor total payment: -850 + 825 = $-25
Net result
The “upgrade” results in the vendor owing Atlassian $25, despite $100 of new revenue.
As previously processed by the old commerce platform, the vendor would have instead received a payment of $75, so the vendor is $100 worse off than they would have been before.
I do not know if this behavior was previously considered or intended, but it does not seem correct accounting-wise (let alone fair).
Can your team investigate this and see if there is a way to make things right before the discount change arrives?