Atlassian’s “Stimulus Package”: Get JIRA & Confluence for $5/Year
April 20th, 2009 (4:00pm) Imran Ali 10 CommentsTweet This (9)
Back in February, I wrote about the internal culture of Atlassian, one of the leading lights in web-based collaboration software.
Beginning today, the company is offering the “Atlassian Stimulus Package,” almost giving away its flagship products — JIRA & Confluence — for just $5 per year, including support. These starter editions are fully functional, but are limited to five users and so suited to freelancers and smaller businesses.
As the company’s Laura Khalil explained, the promotion’s goals are to sell 5,000 licenses and donate the proceeds to children’s education charity Room to Read. The promotion runs for five days only. At the end of the year, you’ll be able to renew for the same price, with that money also being donated to charity.
JIRA is very powerful bug-tracking software, while Confluence is an excellent wiki-based collaboration tool used by many businesses worldwide. However, the cost of these products may have put off many freelancers and small companies. By lowering barriers of entry for small groups and startups, Atlassian may well be enabling an entire generation of freelancers to quickly integrate powerful support and collaboration mechanisms into their businesses.
This “stimulus package” is an interesting marketing tactic. It should expand its user base and address customer needs simultaneously. It’s easy to picture this as a cynical maneuver, but it’s a shame more companies aren’t thinking creatively about how to navigate the recession. Imagine what a similar “stimulus package on” Microsoft Office or Adobe CS4 could do for small companies and startups!
What do you think of Atlassian’s offer?
Tags: atlassian, confluence, jira
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RT is free, if you are paying an admin already. Not sure why one pays for these over RT and Twiki.
I imagine there are good reasons, I just don’t know them. Anyone?
Thanks, for this post, Confluence is an awesome wiki (I’ve used at least a dozen of them) and we use this at work. I have a small business where I’m the IT guy and when they wanted a wiki, I was hoping I could leverage my Confluence skills but it was just too expensive to justify. This made my day.
I bought a license + 24 months of support for both products for $30 – you can’t beat that, even if it’s just to have a “sandbox” environment to learn on and add to my skills. If I can put them to use on a project or two (I typically use Trac or Mantis), so much the better.
The main drawback is server resources. Since both products are Java base, you will need server resources.
Getting a VPS suitable for the server (the requirements state you need about 512MB RAM for JIRA) will start at $40 per month. You can use Amazon EC2 but your cost is elastic, too. Would love to hear how much people are paying for this on EC2.
I love the price… but the name of the sales promotion is tacky. Might as well called it “Got Jira” :)
@Zviki – Check out this blog post on how to set up JIRA and Confluence on Amazon EC2: http://tr.im/jlzl
We created an “Instant Atlassian” tool to make setup easier and estimate server costs to be $5/week.
@Daniel,
I played a little with EC2 pricing. Your post (great post, btw) states it clearly: monthly cost would be about $70 per month for 24/7 server, down to about $20 for operating the sever 45 hours a week. Kind of loses its’ purpose, though. You can’t have a wiki for customers which is not 24/7.
Great initiative, nevertheless.
I created a start up batch script that also updates DNS @ zoneedit.com. http://www.ausbusiness.net/review/confluence-jira-amazon-ec2-zoneedit/
Hope it can be useful for someone.
GM22
I don’t think the promotion name is tacky, I’ve already seen plenty of billboards with companies offering “stimulus packages” that are a lot less valuable than this one. Good thinking by Atlassian.