Disclaimer: This announcement is for partners who are building app editions for Marketplace. For more resources, Marketplace Partners are encouraged to visit the App Editions Resource Center in the Partner Portal. If you’re a customer, stay tuned for an official announcement for app editions are ready for you to try and buy.
If you're a Marketplace Partner, you're used to making important decisions. Like any business owner, you need to weigh the investments you make in features and services with the likelihood that customers will pay for those features and services. You estimate the sizes of different markets, choose your target audience, and build and price your offering accordingly.
As Atlassian's Premium and Enterprise customer base has grown and our focus has shifted to cloud, we know you're encountering new trade-offs and challenging decisions. Atlassian has faced similar challenges and trade-offs. To expand the audiences we're able to address with our products, we created editions. Editions allow us to build and monetize features for customers with more needs and a higher willingness to pay while maintaining more affordable offerings for price-sensitive customers and growing our user base among free customers.
After many conversations with customers and Marketplace Partners like you, we're excited to announce that next year, Marketplace Partners will be able to start offering editions of their cloud apps on the Atlassian Marketplace.
How will the editions be structured?
Ultimately, we plan to release tools to help you build and sell Free, Standard, and Advanced editions of your apps. The Free edition will take the place of our existing $0 price point for 1-10 users, but it will be a real edition, with the option to differentiate features and services from the Standard and Advanced editions.
Free, Standard, and Advanced versions of apps will be purchasable across all customer segments, regardless of their host product plan. That means a Jira Cloud customer on the Free edition could install an Advanced version of your app, or a Jira Cloud customer on the Enterprise edition could install a Standard app.
These editions will provide additional flexibility to help you build a more detailed monetization and growth strategy. Editions will be a valuable tool for partners looking to build volume with Free, maintain a strong base of budget-conscious paid customers with Standard, and fully monetize high-willingness-to-pay customers with Advanced.
What are the requirements for editions?
Because many customers see the Cloud Fortified requirements as the baseline for trust in cloud, your Standard app must be Cloud Fortified in order to offer an Advanced edition. Some of the Cloud Fortified investments are difficult to separate by edition, and many customers do not see these features as "advanced" but rather as baseline requirements for trust and enterprise readiness, so the Standard edition of Cloud Fortified apps will also offer the Cloud Fortified features (security, reliability, support).
If you have invested in making your app Cloud Fortified, you will be able to package new features or services of your Cloud Fortified app into a higher-priced Advanced edition to appeal to a customer segment that sees your app as business-critical.
We know that Cloud Fortified is an investment in customer trust in cloud, and we want to give you the opportunity to monetize your investment without increasing your app's base price beyond what many customers are willing to pay. The Advanced app edition gives you the option to package features which appeal to your app's "power users" and price them appropriately to maximize your app's reach and profits.
Here is an overview of the editions structure, to simplify the requirements and guidelines:
When will app editions be released to customers?
To give you time to strategize, build, hire, and otherwise prepare for this major change, and to accommodate our customer's staged migration to a new payments system, we are currently planning for a Q2 2023 (calendar year) customer launch of the Advanced app edition.
In parallel to the release of App Editions, Atlassian will be migrating customers in stages onto a new payments system. To minimize disruptions for customers, we will release the Free edition only after all customers are on the new payments system. That means the Free edition would launch to customers shortly after the Advanced edition — tentatively Q3 2023 (calendar year).
While the customer launch of the Advanced edition is roughly a year away, you will be able to start building and adding your app editions to the Marketplace in the background starting tentatively in Q3 or Q4 2022 (calendar year). We'll provide regular updates to the timeline when we have more firm dates.
How can I get started with my editions strategy?
App editions open up lots of new opportunities for growth and monetization. With app editions you can:
Appeal to more customer segments: Editions are designed to help you to build volume with Free, maintain a strong base of budget-conscious paid customers with Standard, and fully monetize high-willingness-to-pay customers with Advanced.
Monetize your investments in cloud: This change makes it possible for you to add a higher-priced Advanced edition with new, differentiated features or services to your Cloud Fortified apps. This provides a lever to monetize investments in cloud, without impacting sales among more budget-conscious customers.
Provide clarity to customers about your full offering: By making it possible to display app editions under a single listing, you'll be able to clearly communicate your full offering to customers, and more effectively segment and nurture customers.
Here are a few tips and questions to help get you started on crafting your pricing and packaging strategy:
- Think about your audience segmentation strategy.
- Understand your customers – do they fall into different groups?
- What does each audience care about?
- What do they struggle with?
- What is their willingness to pay for a solution to their unique challenges?
- Is your app business critical for customers?
- With this in mind, who is your Advanced edition for?
- Who is your Standard edition for?
- Who is your Free edition for?
- Take note of value benchmarks.
- How much value does each edition provide compared to the parent product (ex: Jira or Confluence)? This should provide an upper bound for your price.
- How much value does your Advanced edition provide compared to your Standard edition? (ex: 20% more value = 20% higher price)
- Take note of Marketplace competitors and category benchmarks.
- What category do customers think you're in?
- Which apps in your category are targeting the enterprise market vs the SMB market?
- What do they offer and what are their prices?
- How much value does your Advanced edition provide compared to dedicated standalone solutions for your category (ex: how much value does your OKR tracking app provide compared to dedicated OKR tracking tools on the market)?
These questions are just a few examples to get you into the mind of your customers when they're making decisions about which app and which edition to buy. Visit the app editions resource center in the Partner Portal to find more in-depth tips, customer insights, FAQs, and guidelines. We will use the Partner Portal for most news and updates on this topic.
*If your company requires access to the Partner Portal and you meet Partner Program requirements (at least 1 paid-via-Atlassian app and a private domain), submit a request to set up your Partner access here. If your Partner account has already been whitelisted, you can otherwise validate your company email for Partner Portal access here.