JEMHC Plans and large volume customers

After a call with a partner today, I wanted to write about JEMHC capacity Plans and support for Large Scale Customers and why we do the things we do. More background is on the App licensing page.

Why limit at all

JEMHC is a shared service, capacity Plans were built from inception to make the Customer accountable for the data processed through their configuration, to:

1. Prevent broken configurations (e.g. mail loops) loading the system and degrading performance for all customers by capping the volume (msg + data) that they can process per month

2. To incentivise the customer to correct configuration to ensure mail retrieved is actually useful, rather than just feeding us unlimited content, for some small subset to be acted on

How we determine limits

Plan capacities are not fixed and are reviewed ongoing, the capacities set allow for the vast majority of customers, when considered by their active subscription user count, to process and send mail at no extra cost. There are always outlier top-volume customers in every Plan tier, for them additional capacity is offered through Data Packs (short term, more expensive) and Plan Upgrades (12 month term commitment, cheaper).

Subscription costs

JEMHC like all Atlassian cloud apps is paid per-user, there is a tiered pricing structure that is applied monthly, so regardless of whether a customer has bought a ‘premium’ subscription (e.g. 500), apps like JEMHC do not see that and only charge for active users that also happens to drive Plan Allocation, so the Plan may be lower than expected.

As customers active subscription users increase, they already get a higher Plan, so in theory, and from our records, we can see most customers are fine. JEMHC is designed to scale, we welcome larger customers with open arms.

Why purchasing Data Packs and Plan Upgrades is not in Marketplace

We’ve asked and lobbied Atlassian, to no avail. There are simply not enough ‘volume’ sensitive apps for Atlassian to take note of this case, so JEMHC is in itself unique. We do it ourselves because we have to, because Plan Limits (and dealing with the consequence of customers hitting them) is integral to being able to offer JEMHC to customers.

Cloud: It has to be a mutual fit

Where JEMHC differs from most cloud apps is the IO load it takes on, it simply is not a case of a simple storage bucket. The typical point of contention typically comes with ‘relatively low' subscription users and ‘relatively high’ data volumes. For our part whilst we would hope to attract larger customers, we cannot do so where it doesn't work for us, eg:

Customer has 115 active users, is allocated the Silver2 Plan of 9K msgs and 640MB pcm. Customer monthly data demand is for 125Kmsgs (14x allocated plan) and unknown data volumes pcm for the same cost ($287.5 pcm)

As you’d expect, JEMHC can scale up to meet demand but that has obvious costs. In the above example, on a cost basis, it is simply not viable for us to support customers high data demand (and provide support) for ‘relatively low’ subscription users. If customers do not want to pay more, we have no real way to do more and JEMHC is regretfully not going to work out in that case………

The future:

We will continue to review customer usage and revise plan capacities over time, as we have increased both Data and Message volume in the last few months, there won’t be changes for a while.

For customers that require much higher volumes than Krypton, we added Xenon “Large Volume Messaging” Plan tiers covering capacities up to 150Kmsg and 25GB pcm for discussion, as yet unpriced.