Atlassian’s New Usage Limits Are Coming: What Rovo & Automation Users Need to Know
On the 1st September, all Atlassian admins got an email that was largely expected, but in the small print contained a bombshell that for several companies could significantly impact the way they use Atlassian products to streamline their workflows.
Atlassian have always maintained that usage based pricing for Rovo would be introduced and in light of other AI products recently increasing their prices, it’s no surprise that Atlassian have chosen now to implement their own model.
However, the changes to Automation flows were completely unexpected, and owing to how deeply Automation is integrated into workflows of almost all Jira and Confluence users, it’s going to take a lot more work to understand how it will affect each organisation.Crucially, the time to discover the impact of the changes is also very short, with the new limits due to come into force on 3rd December 2026.
Rovo
It has always been known that Atlassian were looking to implement usage based pricing in line with other AI providers, and there have been a number of usage tracking tools live for several months in Atlassian Administration, but now exceeding these limits will stop Rovo from working, or incur a bill. Crucially, the default setting will be to enable ‘extra usage’ meaning a bill could arrive unexpectedly in the early months.
There are 2 limits to account for, Rovo credits and connected objects, where allowances are pooled across your Atlassian Organisation. Rovo credits are consumed when interacting with Rovo chat or a Rovo Agent, interactions through the MCP server will also consume credits in your Rovo allowance.Connected objects are connected through MCP and give greater context to the work in Jira/Confluence, by bringing in data from other tools.
Rovo Search, inline summaries, and text rewrites remain 100% free and do not consume Rovo credits, but interactions with Chat or Agents will consume credits.
More detail on allowances can be found at How Rovo credits work
Automation
The big change here is moving from total successful Flows, to billing for each step completed and whether they complete an action or not. Two common examples are:
Having complex, multi-step flows to cover several actions in a single successful run, these will now count significantly towards usage limits
Wide-ranging flows, that are filtered to only run successfully in limited circumstances. These will now count towards usage limits, even if no actions are completed in the majority of cases
Steps include:
Triggers
Conditions
Actions
Branches
Loops
Enterprise customers will also no longer be entitled to unlimited Automations, further increasing the impact of this change.
What else was announced
AssetsAssets has been split out of being linked with Jira Service Management, meaning teams can leverage the flexible databases across other Atlassian Products.
Customer Service ManagementCSM is an AI-focused, Customer facing skin for Jira Service Management. It will now charge $1.00/resolution for each request that is resolved end-to-end without human intervention.
BitbucketBitbucket meters are now centrally managed in Atlassian Administration and Build Minutes are pooled across an organisation.
What you need to do
The new limits are due to come into force on 3rd December 2026. Before then:
Visit the announcement page, where there are a number of tools to help estimate your usage - Usage-Based Pricing
Review your current usage of Rovo in Atlassian Administration - Insights > Platform usage.
Review your Rovo usage and identify efficiencies. You will be able to see usage by User, to identify where reductions may be required.
Ensure the correct tools are connected via MCP. Connecting unnecessary tools will result in over usage of the connected objects allowance or Rovo credits through MCP
Consider disabling extra usage or set a spending limit - Manage extra usage for a meter
Review your Automation usage in Jira and Confluence, refine rules to reduce steps and reduce triggers that don’t cause any action to be taken
Jira Settings > Global Automation > Usage
Confluence Settings > Global Automation > Usage
Contact us for support with reducing your potential bills by making Automation or Rovo usage more efficient.
The Takeaway
Hidden in the detail of these announcements and usage limits is a further step in Atlassian moving towards their collections model of pricing. Service Collection is already fully rolled out, and Team Work Collection has been visibly higher on their agenda for several months now.
The usage allowances for both Rovo and Automation are noticeably more generous on both Service Collection and Team Work Collection.
Confluence looks to be the most affected product, almost reducing the allowances to the point of being worthless. As an example:
Confluence Premium reduces from 1000 successful Flows per user to 250 steps. Considering each automation is at least 2 steps (A Trigger and an Action), and realistically likely somewhere from 5-10 steps*, this results in a realistic usage allowance per user of around 50 Flows per month, which would be around 95% less than today. Jira Premium has a significant, but lesser reduction of around 90%.
But the Service Collection and Team Work Collections have almost exactly the correct number of steps to offset this billing change, 5,000 and 6,500 steps respectively at Premium, meaning real world reductions of around 30% and 7%
Atlassian have at least made additional Flows pretty reasonably priced at $0.50 per 1,000 additional steps - How is your automation usage calculated
*See Atlassian's own sample Automation Flows page - Most popular Jira automation templates. I have used 7 steps for all my calculations.
