Atlassian now offers startups a year of free access

Long before product-led growth became a buzzword, Atlassian offered free tiers for virtually all of its productivity and development tools. Today, this mainly means free access for up to ten users and a few other limitations. For startups, this is a good way to get started with the company’s tools like Jira and Bitbucket, but they also quickly reach the limits of what’s possible at this free tier.

For early-stage companies that need more seats and access to some of the most advanced features, Atlassian today launched its “Atlassian for startups“, which offers companies less than $10 million in funding per year of free access for up to 50 users.

Products covered by this program include Jira, Confluence, Loom, Jira Product Discovery, Bitbucket, and Compass.

Few companies switch out their productivity tools and issue trackers like Jira once they get started, so this is obviously a way to bring growing startups into the Atlassian ecosystem and keep them on the platform as they grow.

Atlassian CMO Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir, who joined the company last October, told me that the company has long watched startups grow on its platform to become large, mature companies.

“It’s clearly a win-win situation,” she told me. “We love the idea of ​​removing the burden of work and project management and scaling that entire process to a company so it can really focus on its innovation […] So we thought, okay, let’s help the startup community to maybe make it easier to get started with this.”

One thing worth noting here is that while Atlassian started in the tech community, it is heavily focused on bringing in non-tech startups as well, especially with its Jira project management and Confluence collaboration products (and is building on that with your 2023 acquisition from the Loom asynchronous video messaging service as well). Ozdemir told me he expects a large number of non-tech companies to also apply to the Atlassian for Startups program.

At launch, Atlassian also partnered with several accelerators and portfolio companies, including AWS Activate, Accel, Blackbird, and Menlo Ventures.