Long before product-led growth became a buzzword, Atlassian offered free tiers for virtually all of its productivity and developer tools. Today, that mostly means free access for up to 10 users and some other limitations. For startups, that’s a good way to get started with the company’s tools like Jira and Bitbucket, but they also quickly hit the limits of what’s possible in that free tier.
For those early-stage companies that need more seats and access to some of the more advanced features, Atlassian today launched its Atlassian for Startups program, which provides companies with under $10 million in funding a year of free access for up to 50 users.
The products covered by this program include Jira, Confluence, Loom, Jira Product Discovery, Bitbucket, and Compass.
Few companies switch 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 then 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 management and project management and scaling that whole process for a company so that they can really focus on their innovation […] So we thought, okay, we’re going to help the startup community to maybe make it easier to get started with that.”
One thing that’s worth noting here is that while Atlassian got its start in the tech community, it’s focused heavily on bringing on non-tech startups as well, especially with its Jira project management and Confluence collaboration products. It’s building on that with its 2023 acquisition of the asynchronous video messaging service Loom, too. Ozdemir tells me that she expects a large number of non-tech companies to apply to the Atlassian for Startups program, too.
At launch, Atlassian is also partnering with several accelerators and their portfolio companies, including AWS Activate, Accel, Blackbird and Menlo Ventures.