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Atlassian's October rates charge Connect apps eight points more than Forge apps
Atlassian takes 25% of Connect revenue and 17% of Forge revenue from 1 October 2026, with partners keeping their first $1 million of lifetime Forge revenue. Vendors still on Connect pay at least eight points more on every sale until their Forge port ships.
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What happened
- Atlassian's 3 November 2025 timeline post had set its share at 16% for Forge and 20% for Connect from 1 April 2026.
- A Marketplace partner's write-up of Atlassian's partner day reports that a Connect date has also moved.
- Ricksoft, which makes WBS Gantt-Chart for Jira, says its entire app portfolio is now on Forge.
- On 2 October Atlassian raised the Forge LLMs limit from 50,000 to 500,000 tokens per minute, per installation and per model.
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Why it matters
- cost Connect vendors absorbed five points of increase in six months against one for Forge, so the price of staying on Connect is climbing faster than the Forge rate.
- decision Vendors with small lifetime sales gain most by porting first, because every Forge dollar they earn until the $1 million mark stays with them.
- contradiction A team porting to Forge for its AI modules has to check the module reference as well as the changelog, because the two disagree on whether rovo:mcp's third-party client access is fit for production.
The higher rates took effect four days before Partner Accelerate, the partner-only day Atlassian ran at RAI Amsterdam on Monday 5 October [18][1]. The figures come from Atlassian's extended timeline post, as summarized by a two-person Forge app company that attended and wrote the day up on dev.to [4][13].
In April the gap between Connect and Forge was four points [19]. From October it is eight [16].
The Forge allowance moves the comparison further than the headline rates do. Take an app with $1 million in sales. On Connect at 25%, Atlassian's share is $250,000. The same sales on Forge, inside the lifetime allowance, owe Atlassian nothing [15]. After the allowance is spent, the difference settles at $8,000 for every $100,000 of sales [14].
Those figures hold for a real app only if all of its sales fall under the schedule as written and Atlassian counts the app as Forge. Under those conditions, the port pays off when its engineering cost is less than eight points of the revenue the app would earn on Connect while the work waits [16].
The partner's account breaks off before giving the new Connect date [5]. Any port schedule still has to be worked back from Atlassian's own timeline post.
The Forge side gets one default right. The rovo:mcp module, in Preview since 1 October, makes a Forge app's Rovo actions available as tools, usable by custom agents built in Rovo Studio and by MCP clients including Claude Desktop, Codex and Cursor [7]. External access stays off until it is enabled for each installation [8].
One config line needs review in any port that adds a Teamwork Graph connector through the graph:connector module. Permissions carry over only when the connector declares replicatesPermissions: true [11]. If the flag is false, the module reference says "all ingested data is visible to every user in the Atlassian workspace" [12].
What to watch
- Atlassian's published new Connect date, the fixed point any port schedule has to work back from.
- Whether the rovo:mcp module reference moves third-party AI client access out of EAP.
- Any further rate step in Atlassian's timeline after the 1 October 2026 schedule.