confluence pricing for service desk users

[Pieter Claeys]

Hi,

about the pricing model of JIRA Servicedesk combined with Confluence as a knowledgebase...

The servicedesk 2.0 pricing model uses the number of 'agent' role members to determine the license tier. So in theory, you can server 10.000 customer users with a 10-agent license. So far, so good.
Next, add confluence to set up a knowledgebase and implement the great idea of providing self-help to avoid issues being created. 

Since the end-users need access to confluence, you should choose between these two options:

• buy a confluence license for 10.000 users, so the 10.000 customers have secured access to the knowledgebase.
  • Pro: the knowledgebase content is not publicly available to the entire world. Companies don't always want to give all their product and knowledgebase docs so easiliy to competitors.
  • Con: buying all these licenses for users who just need to view (not edit) ... that's too much
• Allow anonymous access:
  • Pro: don't have to pay a confluence license for 10.000 users
  • Con: Knowledgebase / documentation is publicly accessible on the WWW

Obviously, this is in the scenerio to user JIRA service desk to provide support to external customers (no option to limit jira/confluence access to the company internal network).

Is Atlassian thinking about aligning confluence pricing with the service desk pricing? 
(for example: confluence users that can only view pages and add comments don't count for the user limit?)

Or is there another type of solution possible?

[Pieter Claeys]

Hi Martin,

thanks for the input, but " A shared user that all customers used " is completely the opposite of what the intended use is of JIRA Service desk (being, logging issues and viewing the issues you created).

To me, it feels like the new Servide desk agent-based pricing model was invented as a response to the (rightful) feedback that the previous pricing was way too expensive for a large number of occasional uses; but somehow the confluence pricing was forgotten in that picture. 

[Martin Cleaver]

If you used something like:

• A shared user that all customers used; and
• Disqus for comments

You may be able to get what you are looking for.

Sooner or later you may wish to involve customers at a deeper level though. You could make real Confluence user accounts for highly engaged customers.

Another alternative is to have some method to deploy a separate confluence instance per customer, and bill them for it. An advantage of this is that (only) users from the same customer organization could see comments from their peers.