Atlassian starts billing Loom's watchers, and deletes the growth loop
Loom's free viewer seats inside paying accounts are being converted to full paid seats automatically. Four acquirers have run the same free-tier cut inside two years, and the defaults tell you who understood their funnel.
Loom's growth worked like this. One person records a video, a room full of colleagues watch it, and a few of them decide that beat a meeting and start recording themselves.
The watchers cost nothing because the watchers were the top of the funnel.
Atlassian has now discontinued the free Creator Lite role. According to Atlassian's own support documentation, as reported by SaaStr, every Creator Lite user is upgraded to a full paid Creator seat on the workspace's integration date.
Admins get a grace period until the next billing date to deactivate anyone they do not want to pay for. Miss it and those people are on the invoice.
The arithmetic is blunt. A workspace with 10 recorders and 90 watchers used to pay for 10 seats. It now pays for 100, at $15 to $24 a head on SaaStr's figures.
Loom's free Starter plan still exists at $0, with 25 recordings and a five-minute cap. What went is the free seat inside a paying account, which is the seat nobody was going to replace by opening their own separate account.
Atlassian paid roughly $975m for Loom in late 2023. SaaStr puts the product at 25 million users, with business users recording close to five million videos a month.
The rational admin response to a bill for 90 watchers is not to pay it. It is to deactivate 85 of them, who still need to send video and will find somewhere that does not charge for watching.
Figma faced the same question in the same year and set the opposite default. Its March 2025 seat restructure raised Full seat prices but created a free View seat across Design, Slides and FigJam, plus a $3 a month Collab seat, and Figma's documentation says new users join on the free View seat with admin approval required before a paid upgrade. Miro keeps visitors free on paid plans.
One model makes a person free until an admin approves a charge. The other makes a person billable until an admin removes them.
The clock is the other pattern worth noting. On SaaStr's timeline, Salesforce cut Slack's free tier 12 months after closing its $27.7bn acquisition, IBM ended HCP Terraform's legacy free plan 13 months after closing its $6.4bn HashiCorp deal, Intuit began narrowing Mailchimp's free plan at around 18 months, and Atlassian moved on Loom at 26.
Mailchimp's free contact allowance went from 2,000 in 2022 to 500 in 2023 to 250 from 17 February 2026, which SaaStr calls a cut of roughly 87% in four years. MailerLite halved its free plan from 1,000 subscribers to 500 in September 2025.
The incentive is visible in the reported numbers. Atlassian's Q3 FY26 revenue was $1.787bn, up 32%, and the company attributes growth primarily to paid seat expansion, higher ARPU and cross-sell. Converting free viewers into paid seats delivers both, without a salesperson.
For a founder with a free tier, the practice to take from this is not "never charge". It is to know which free users are cost and which are distribution, and to write that down before a finance model treats them as the same line.
And if you do cut, the default decides the outcome. Opt-in costs you revenue you were never collecting. Auto-billing costs you the people who were doing your selling.