You may be in the tricky position where you need to add only a handful of new users to your Jira instance, but doing so pushes the price up significantly.
This article is for customers who pay annually and can also be applied to Confluence, Jira Service Management and other Atlassian products.
How does adding users work?
If you pay annually, licenses are priced by the tier your users fall in to. For instance if you have 991 Jira users each with a license, it would fall into the 501 - 1,000 data centre license tier, or the 801 – 1,000 cloud license tier (depending on your deployment choice). The price is fixed to the tier.
Say you add 10 new users with a license each, leaving everything else as it is, you will be pushed into the next highest tier. That’s an extra $71,000 a year for data centre or $17,000 for cloud premium, just for 10 users. You may be wondering if it’s even worth it.
Figures based on the Jira list price in September 2025
Can I Avoid The Price Jump?
Luckily there are a couple of simple strategies you can adopt.
Manual Removal of Users
Check through your users and remove product access from users that don’t require a license at this time, freeing up licenses to assign to new users.
You can reassign these licenses back at a later time if needs be, as long as the licenses are available.
Automated Approach
What if there was a time and cost efficient way to automate this process? Our solution, IUM, does exactly that. Licenses float simultaneously within your chosen group of users.
A user is assigned a license when they log on, which is revoked and returned to float once they become inactive. The user is oblivious to the process and experiences no friction online or offline.
Our testing finds that ~20% of total users are ever active at the same time. So for 1,000 users you can assign 200 licenses instead of being pushed into the next license tier, or manually reassigning them yourself.
In fact, there’s actually opportunity to downgrade to a lower tier and save money. Customers using this solution save between 20% and 40% in cost from user tier downgrades.
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