Bitbucket Cloud will bill for every workspace member, not just private-repo users

What Atlassian announced

As atlassian.com reported in its notice to customers, Bitbucket Cloud is changing how it decides who counts toward your bill. Starting October 31st, 2023, every member of a workspace will be treated as a billable user. A workspace is the shared account area where a team keeps its code repositories (the folders that store a project's files and history).

Until now, Bitbucket billed only for people who had some form of access to a private repository, whether that access was granted directly or came with their role. People who could only see public repositories, or who belonged to the workspace without access to any repository, were left off the bill.

Atlassian says the new rule brings Bitbucket in line with how its other products count users, including Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud.

A simple example of the new math

Atlassian gives a plain illustration. Suppose your 'User directory' page lists 100 people, but only 95 of them can reach a private repository. Today you are billed for 95. After the change, all 100 are billable.

The gap can come from many places: a contractor who was added to the workspace and never given repository access, a former colleague whose account was never removed, or someone who only looks at public projects. Under the old model they were free to keep around. Under the new one, each is a seat you pay for.

The company also describes a longer-term reason. It wants one shared definition of a user so that Bitbucket accounts can be managed inside Atlassian Administration and Access, its central place for handling people across products. Atlassian links this change to that plan for unified user management.

Who pays more, and who gets locked

The effect depends on your plan. On a paid plan, if the new count of billable users is higher than the old one, your bill goes up. The increase starts with the first billing cycle after October 31st, 2023, so it will not necessarily show up on that exact date.

Free plans face a different consequence. Free workspaces are tied to a limit of 5 billable users. If the new definition pushes your count above 5, every repository in the workspace becomes read-only. That means people can still look at the code but cannot add to it. The lock stays until you remove enough users or move the workspace to a paid plan.

So a small team that thought it was comfortably free could find that a few idle accounts have quietly put it over the line.

How admins can check their workspaces

Atlassian says admins of affected workspaces will receive an email on September 29/30th, depending on time zone, listing the workspaces whose billing will change. It suggests reviewing each one to decide whether everyone listed should stay on the plan. You can also look yourself:

• Open your workspaces page and click 'Manage' (it appears only where you are an admin).
• Choose 'User Directory' in the left-hand menu.
• Use the filter dropdown and select 'Users not on plan'. These are the people not billed today but who will be after October 31st, 2023.
• For anyone who should not stay, open the Actions menu next to their name and choose 'Remove'.
• Repeat for every workspace you manage.

One detail: the 'Users not on plan' filter will disappear once the new model starts, because everyone will then be on the plan.

Paid-plan customers with questions are directed to Atlassian support. Free-plan users are pointed to the Atlassian Community page.

A note on the spam comment

This story reached us because of a comment under the notice. The commenter's name is a promotional phrase linked to a Binance-branded site with a 'register' prompt. That comment is spam. It is not from Atlassian and says nothing about the billing change.

The distinction matters because billing notices attract worried readers. Take the details from the official post and from your own workspace settings, not from a comment thread, and do not follow links from commenters who offer help with your bill.