Announcing the Next Chapter for Bitbucket Pipelines Runners
In December 2025, we announced our intention to introduce pricing for self-hosted runners so we could provide stronger support and keep investing in new features and ongoing improvements.
You’ve told us that having a free option is important.
As a result, we’re introducing a new operating model that lets you continue using self‑hosted runners for free with the option to upgrade to a paid premium runners tier as your needs grow.
What does this mean for you?
We’ll continue to offer a free tier that is perfect for small to medium teams, up to 100 basic runners per workspace.
For teams who need more, we are introducing a new Premium runners offering, that is ideal for teams with complex workloads, higher scale, or compliance needs. This offering will unlock advanced orchestration, higher limits, premium support.
Previously, customers paid $15 per concurrent-build per-month based on their Workspace’s maximum concurrent builds (managed by the workspace concurrency limit). Our billing model will be changed to reflect the maximum concurrent build slots actually used by runners each month, while the workspace concurrency limit will serve as a control to cap billing and manage queue behaviour. This change is aimed at improving the flexibility of our pricing model to better reflect real customer usage.
You will be able to upgrade your workspace to premium runners at any time. Depending on your current runners setup, your workspace may be migrated with premium runners enabled by default, see the “Migration Scenarios” table below for more information.
Changes will be reflected in your monthly billing, and charged by month.
Migration & transition details: Action required
In line with the original announcement, on June 3, 2026 we will release a new runner version that includes system updates, patches, and security fixes. This will be the upgrade path for both free and premium runners.
- Steps that require premium features will run only in workspaces where premium runners are enabled.
- From this June 3, customer support will be available only for workspaces with premium runners enabled.
- Workspaces with premium runners enabled will continue to get 1 included premium runner in Standard tier workspaces, and 2 included premium runners in Premium tier workspaces.
- Workspaces with premium runners disabled will be able to utilise up to 100 free runners in their workspace, regardless of workspace tier.
Migration Scenarios
There are three possible scenarios that a workspace may be in during the migration process, so we want to clearly explain what will happen in each.
| Scenario | Info |
|---|---|
| A workspace is using all V5 runners today. | This workspace will be migrated with the premium runners functionality enabled.Their “max concurrent builds” setting will remain the same, builds will continue as per today.All v5 runners will operate as premium runners after the migration. |
| A workspace is using all v3 runners today. | This workspace will be migrated with the premium runners functionality disabled.All v3 runners will operate as free runners after the migration.This workspace can continue using up to 100 free runners while the premium runners functionality is disabled. |
| A workspace is using a combination of v5 and v3 runners today. | This workspace will be migrated with the premium runners functionality enabled.All v5 and v3 runners will operate as premium runners after the migration.Their “max concurrent builds” setting will remain the same.There will be no increase in the workspaces bill, unless they increase their “max concurrent builds” from the amount set at migration. |
Note for customers using a combination of v5 and v3 runners today:
In situations where customers had significantly more v3 runners than v5 runners, they may experience a decrease in total build throughput due to the “max concurrent builds” setting now applying to all runners in the workspace post-migration.
Prefer to stay on the free tier?
If you do not want to opt your workspace into premium runners, you should:
Deprovision all v5 runners, resulting in your workspace being migrated with premium runners disabled.
Premium Runner Features
Our new premium runners offering will include:
- Premium support: Dedicated, premium support for self-hosted runners.
- Pluggable storage: Support for custom pluggable storage options.
- Increased runner limits: Configure up to 1,000 runners per workspace, with increased queue limits above free tier.
- Runner management APIs: we have recently made public APIs for managing runners to all workspaces, including free.
Additionally, we’re continuing to invest in new Enterprise-grade features:
- Runner Groups: A powerful new way to organise and manage runners at the workspace level.
- Disable Cloud Runners: A policy for premium runners customers to prevent builds from running on cloud runners.
- Ephemeral macOS runners: self‑hosted runners where each build runs in a fresh, short‑lived macOS VM.
- Auto-update: A built-in mechanism for automatically updating premium runners for customers.
- Advanced Queue Management: Administrative controls for runner step queues.
Have questions or feedback?
Join the conversation on our Atlassian Community page, review our support docs or reach out to our support team.