How do you actually do custom and sponsored development for your Atlassian apps?

We want something changed in the Linchpin User Profiles app for Atlassian Confluence. We have talked about it already? What would be your estimate for this work? - I would need to understand what commitment you require from us…

We are a pretty flat organization. So this is none of my personal business. All decisions on pricing and customer shares of cost are defined by our teams who develop the Atlassian apps. The fundamental questions for me are:

  • Marketplace revenues
    Will the feature improve our marketplace sales significantly? Does it dilute the clear profile of the addon? How big is the target group.
  • Customer commitment
    Every customer wants new features or existing features better tailored to their situation. From their angle it is often perfectly clear, that a feature request is actually a bug, that “every customer” will expect and they should get the change for free. How could //SEIBERT/MEDIA dare to even ask for money. While I have been in the same shoes with other software, following this would probably not be a very sustainable business model for //SEIBERT/MEDIA. So the question is: Is the customer (you) paying enough for this change to ensure, that they really want this change to happen? Are they committed to this? This is a very important test, that I want all of teams to do.

Your answer is already helpful as it shows at least a fundamental readiness to consider paying for added work. Thanks for that.

What we do not do with sponsored development is to split investments that are below 1,000 Euros. The administrative effort to charge a customer 500 Euros and the checking for features and communication isn’t worth while. Then I see a common customer budget share between 1,000 Euros and 4,500 Euros. That’s mainly for smaller features and enhancements. The cool thing is that normally it’s pretty obvious for such features if the mission is accomplished or not.

Then we sometimes see budgets between 10,000 and 100,000 Euros. Those are big and sometimes massive enhancements or even new apps, that we develop with customers together. In such ranges we often offer additional perks like (free or even lifetime licenses, …). A customer helping us enhance a product with such a budget usually gets a special deal and often we “overdeliver” dramatically to say thank you for this.

I hope that helps. My assumption would be, that the things you’re asking for would be in the small budget area of 1 to 5k Euros. But as said: Not my turf.

Does that help?