Firstly, thanks for the compliments on our products. We spend a lot of time and money trying to make kick-ass products. By spending your time writing such a long post – you obviously care about helping us be more successful.

Regarding your thoughts on purchasing, I think that you have focused on one negative aspect, and ignored a lot of others.

Atlassian offers evaluation licenses for all of its products, which mean you can download and use our products (unrestricted) for 30 days, after which you have to come back to the website and get another license. Even during the purchase process, you can continue using an evaluation license until your purchase clears.

We also put our pricing up on the website, and it is the same pricing for everyone. We believe in being transparent in this way. No ‘contact us for a price’, and no worrying that you’ll have to negotiate with a sales person for the best price.

In order to keep our pricing down, we do a number of things that aren’t traditional. We don’t have custom EULAs for different companies. Everyone uses the same contract. We do this because custom EULAs are too expensive, and to do them we would have to raise the price of our software for everyone.

We find the same with POs. We sell our products into 106 countries (at last count), and offering POs to all our customers would mean that we would have to chase payment in 106 countries.

POs would mean we would have to employ someone in each timezone to chase payments around the world. This isn’t a particularly fulfilling job, and we strive to have all our staff in fulfilling jobs. It also means that we would have some level of defaults.

Our solution is to provide continuing evaluation licenses to our end users until their payment comes through. If their PO has 30 or 60 day terms, then they can continue using our software in production (using fully-functional evaluation licenses) until the payment comes through.

Our refusal to accept purchase orders isn’t explained very well on our website, and I will update our documentation to better explain our position.

I’d also love to chat with you directly (email me) to hear any further thoughts on this matter.

Cheers,
Scott

First, thanks for commenting. I really do love the products that your company puts out. I have to say I am curious on why no purchase orders. I’ve ordered Atlassian products at a couple of different companies and this has always been a stumbling block.

If you are ever trying to organize a customer focus group, I would be happy to participate.

Our developers are hooked, though, and asking for more Atlassian tools. Let’s see if they can show our CTO the ROI for FishEye and Crucible.

FYI you’re missing a (crucial) word in:
“I was just talking with a friend who was having [trouble?] buying from Atlassian”.

I don’t get it. I am not sure how someone completes the purchase of a piece of software is a positive differentiation. I know people compete on features, user experience, support, “coolness” or culture, quality, cost, and total cost of ownership. It is very strange to see barriers to purchase as a positive aspect of a company’s culture.

I would love to know more on what difference would cause that inability to purchase via standard corporate purchasing methodology.

Your point on the ROI is a good one. I don’t think we do as good a job as we could in supporting developers through the buying process. It’s something I’m working on, and I’ll keep the ROI suggestion in mind.

As far as not taking a PO goes, well, we’re a different kind of company in lots of ways, and this is one that isn’t likely to change.