Every step has a price tag.
What Atlassian just changed, what it costs, and which of your automation rules are about to get an invoice.
Yes, the meter in the corner is real. Every slide you click costs steps.
"Unlimited" has left the building.
- Monthly allowance
- Each meter gets a monthly quota. Use it or lose it.
- Pooled per org
- One bucket for the whole organisation, not per app or per site.
- No rollover
- Resets on the 1st. Unused steps do not become a savings account.
- Extra usage
- Go over and you pay per unit - or switch extra usage off and hit a wall.
Eight meters. Two of them matter.
| Rovo credits | Chat, agents, Teamwork Graph API calls. | $0.01 / credit |
|---|---|---|
| Automation steps | Every trigger, condition, branch, action, loop. | $0.50 / 1,000 steps |
| JSM* AI resolutions | Support cases the AI agent closes alone. | $1 / resolution |
| Pipeline minutes | Bitbucket CI/CD time. 50 min free, shared per workspace. | today: $10 / 1,000 min |
| Git LFS storage | Big binaries in Bitbucket. 1 GB free, shared. | today: $10 / 100 GB |
| Assets objects | Records in your Assets schema. | tba |
| Packages network | Egress from npm / Maven / PyPI. | tba |
| Packages storage | Registry storage in Bitbucket. | tba |
The two lit up are the ones every Jira admin already has running. The rest depend on whether you use Bitbucket or JSM*.
Rovo and steps: Atlassian docs and the Community admin post. JSM*: the 11.09.2026 webinar. Bitbucket rows: the current add-on price, not yet confirmed for December. tba = Atlassian hasn't published it. Check yours in Platform usage.
* JSM = Jira Service Management
The taxi meter.
Every trigger, condition, branch, action and loop iteration is one step. Lookup issues, Log action and Create/Refresh variable are zero.
Atlassian's own example - one rule, escalating stale high-priority issues, once a day.
Now imagine it runs hourly.
23,040steps · one rule · one month
RULE #0001 · ESCALATE STALE HIGH-PRIORITY
Meet Silmini OÜ.
A imaginary company with a real-sized Jira, but with real background. 100 people, Jira Premium, Confluence Premium. Allowances are per user per month, pooled across the org.
- Jira · 100 × 750
- 75,000
- Confluence · 100 × 250
- 25,000
- Rovo · 200 × 70
- 14,000 credits
Silmini's Jira admin copied the stale-issue rule from the docs in 2023 and set it to hourly, because daily felt slow. That rule alone is now 23% of the entire company's monthly pool.
Nobody at Silmini knows this yet. The admin left in 2024..
Still free.
The everyday AI stuff does not touch Rovo credits. Nobody needs to stop summarising.
- Search & knowledge
- AI answers in Search. Quick summaries, definitions. Page catch-up, page summaries. Comments recap, work summary.
- Jira
- Summarise issue comments. Issue and epic summaries. Similar issues, related pages. Natural-language search.
- Create & plan
- Intelligent work breakdown. Title generation on paste. Generate stickies. Chart insights.
This burns credits.
- Light task
- 100–200
- Few sources, light reasoning, one output. "Make me a presentation from this page."
- Medium task
- 201–500
- Many sources, structured reasoning, two or more deliverables. Governance and compliance tracking.
- Heavy task
- 500+
- Broad aggregation, deep reasoning, multiple outputs. Developer productivity analytics.
10 credits per basic Chat question. Loom transcripts processed by Rovo eat Rovo credits too. The JSM AI agent is $1 per resolution and not in the plan at all - bought separately.
Silmini's 14,000 credits are 1,400 chat questions a month. 14 per person. Marketing's "write me a LinkedIn post" habit is going to be a conversation.
Rule hall of shame.
Every Jira has one of these. Silmini has all four. The number is what a fix saves.
- ~90%
- The hourly scheduler
- "project = X" every hour, touching 400 issues to change 3. Narrow the JQL, run it less, bulk-edit.
- 70–90%
- The trigger-happy rule
- Fires on "issue updated". Fire on "field value changed", "label added", "priority updated" instead.
- 50–60%
- The if/else christmas tree
- Twelve parallel branches to pick an assignee. One smart-value lookup does it.
- a lot
- The domino chain
- Rule A updates a field, which triggers rule B, which triggers rule C. Every link is billed.
Atlassian's pitch: replace the ten-branch tree with one agent that reasons and acts. Fewer steps, yes. Significantly more Rovo credits. Do the maths per rule.
Does your AI agent cost credits?
Assumption from Atlassian's docs, not something to bet the budget on without checking.
- Free, per the docs
- Plain REST API from scripts. And via the Rovo MCP: get, search, create, edit issues, read and update pages, comments. "Look up or update context in any single Atlassian product remains free."
- Costs credits, per the docs
- Teamwork Graph tools: cross-product "find everything related to X". About 1–10 credits per call, charged to the org pool, attributed to whoever connected the agent.
Second-order effect: a script that mass-updates 400 issues fires your "issue updated" rules 400 times. The API call is free. The triggers are not.
The switch.
- Extra usage on
- Default. You go over, you get charge on your card or an invoice in your mail. For Silmini, 100,000 extra steps is $50. The bill is not the scary part - yet.
- Extra usage off
- The allowance runs out on the 23rd, automation simply stops, and the org admin gets an email. Not the users. The users find out when nothing moves.
3 Dec 2026billing starts · usage counted since September
The meter is already visible: admin.atlassian.com → Organisation → Insight → Platform usage. "Most customers never reach the allowance." Believe it when you see your number.
Four things before December.
- 01 · Watch the meter
- Keep an eye on Platform usage monthly from now until 3 December. See what you are currently spending, make a note even if needed.
- 02 · Audit your automation rules
- Pull the rule list and audit log. Find the hourly schedulers, the "issue updated" triggers, the domino chains. Optimize them.
- 03 · Decide the switch
- Extra usage on or off, per meter, on purpose. Off means a hard stop on them and one email to your Organization admin.. While an individual invoice may seem small, these costs will accumulate as you automate more of your workflow.
- 04 · Ask your Atlassian account manager
- Enterprise contracts move to allowances at renewal, allegedly. Get it in writing.
Silmini did the audit. The hourly rule became a daily rule with a narrower JQL. 23,040 steps became 480. Nobody noticed. That's the point.
That'll be $0.0055.
Remember You just clicked through 11 steps of this deck, now imagine doing this 24 times per day. Invoice is in the mail. Questions are still 10 credits each - just kidding.
If your Jira has a Silmini rule in it and you'd rather find it before December does - I can help you.
Contact: hello@techodesk.ee
Sources: Atlassian usage-based pricing webinar, 11.09.2026 · support.atlassian.com · atlassian.com/resources/usage. Silmini OÜ does not exist. Its Jira problems do.