Atlassian ran a cool limited-time “stimulus program” promotion a couple of months ago where they offered a $5 license (limited to 5 users) with the proceeds going to Room to Read, a charity dedicated to providing educational opportunities to children in developing nations. The idea was to give back and do good at a time when this was really needed. The promotion was simple — $5 gets you a full functional license of either JIRA or Confluence with full support for a year (an additional $5 or $10 gets you full support for year 2 and 3). Atlassian figured that they could sell about 5000 such licences to very small business (who need tools but don’t have cash) and make a nice $25K donation to a worthy charity.
As it turns out, this promotion exceeded their expectations in many ways. First of all, they raised over $110,000 for this charity – far exceeding their original goal. More than 7000 signed up, and many paid the $15 to get the license with all three years of support (a steal of a deal!). Second of all, they generated a lot of good-will with many businesses who wanted to use their tools, but the economy was making it tough to spend any money on anything. A cynic might say that raising money $5 at a time is a nice thing to do, but it has nothing to do with the business of making money. After all, if you ask a couple of thousand people for a $5 to $15 donation for a really good cause, you can raise a good chunk of change. But as it turns out, this was a great business promotion too. Atlassian attributed almost $300K of additional sales as a result – since many of the customers who signed up for the promotion then upgraded or purchased other products too. Win-Win-Win. Bravo. Here’s a little more information about this if you care to watch.
Atlassian ran another promotion recently — their “JIRA Cash for Clunkers” program, where you’d get a free instance of JIRA (their issue tracking program) if you moved off of your old issue tracking “clunker”. They topped this one off with a $4000 reward to the company with the best clunker story. I think they are announcing the award this week – I hear they got some great stories and screenshots of old-school issue tracking tools. This great idea also resulted in a Win-Win. And it created a great spotlight for their new JIRA 4.0 version.
[Update, Oct 12. 2009] The winners are announced here. Nicely done, and lots of fun.
Atlassian got such positive feedback from their customers about these programs that they decided to bring back the stimulus program – with a few changes. It’s now called the starter program, and there is no “limited-time” to take advantage of it. It just is the new way to get started. For $10, you can get fully functioning versions of their products, fully supported by Atlassian. The license is perpetual, but the support is only one year. For an additional $10 or $20 you can get support for year 2 or 3. This time they are adding most of their products to the program. Specifically $10 gets you one of the following…
- 10-user JIRA instance (Issue tracking tool)
- 10-user Confluence instance (Enterprise wiki)
- 10-user GreenHopper instance (Agile project management)
- 10 plans, unlimited local agents, 0 remote agents Bamboo instance (Continuous build server)
- 10 committers, 5 repositories FishEye instance (Web based source code inspection tool)
- 50-user Crowd instance (Single Sign-on tools)
Considering how inexpensive and well liked these tools are, it seems like a deal you cannot ignore. And proceeds still go to the Room to Read charity. So if you are a small company — this is a fantastic deal. If you are in a larger company, this program represents a simple way to start with one or two groups and then ramp up if you find the product valuable.
BTW, I blogged about their Confluence product before — one which I used in the past. I am very impressed with the new 3.0 features too. I also used JIRA a bit. But I have not used their other products — which are generally geared to Java developers. I understand that non-Java oriented shops can find many of these tools very useful too — so if you are one such non-Java shop and want to let us know what tool you use and how it’s working for you, please comment below.
Kudos to Atlassian for doing right and doing well.
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Great post Gil – At CustomWare, we’re supporting this initiative (as well as many other Atlassian Plug-in developers) by offering $10 versions of our commercial plugins to match.
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