Make a public repo private again
Asked by JohnGorter:

Hi there,

For some reason we had to make a private repo public for a while. Now when i want to make it private i get the message: "Making this repository private requires more users than TEAM has on their plan."

I removed all the rights to this repo up to 5 remaining members (we are on the FREE plan). But still the message shows up and prevents us from making the repo private again.

Two things. Why was this not an issue when we made the repo (private) and had 19 or so invited members to work on it and why is the reverse action of making a public repo private again with exactly the same settings not possible?

Greets,

John


Answers:
author: Theodora Boudale
body: Hi John,

You can grant as many users as you want to have access to your public repositories. The users that count towards your billing plan are the ones that have access to private repos, so if you are on the Free plan you can have up to 5 users with access to the workspace's private repos.

We count users across all private repos of the workspace. You mentioned that you removed all the rights to this repo up to 5 remaining members. Please keep in mind that if you have another private repo on this workspace that 2 users can access, and these 2 users are not the same ones as the 5 remaining members to your other repo, then the unique users would be 7 which the Free plan does not allow.

You can go to the **Workspace's settings** \> **User directory** \> on that page there is a dropdown that says **All users** . Click on the dropdown and select **Users on plan**. You will then see the users that count towards your plan and if there is a user that is not included in the 5 remaining members of the repo you want to make private. You can view each user's access on that page and also remove users.

Regarding your last comment, if you had 19 users with access to a certain repo, then this repo must have belonged to a workspace on a paid billing plan. It is not possible to have 19 users access a private repo on the Free plan.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Kind regards,  
Theodora

comments: author: JohnGorter
body: Hi Theodora,

Many thanks for your answer, I understand what you explain and will check the user directory in the workspace. However, the situation was that we had the repo private and had to make it public for one night for an automatic update, because the machine had its keys mixed up. Now making the repo public was easy, but to change it back to private within a week seems impossible. Nothing changed, we did not add users or make any other settings regarding user access.

I would rather be warned up front that making the repo public could possibly not be reverted. Now I am stuck in user and settings land while the repo is still publicly available.

John.


author: JohnGorter
body: Ok so the check for the numbers of users on the plan is done when making a repo private, not when a private repo is made public. No warning on the latter.. I will check why the number of users exceeded the number of allowed users or when or why we reverted back to the free plan or if we ever were on a paid plan. In the last case, how was it even possible for us to create more than the number of allowed users... questions I am going to inspect.. Again, many thanks for the answer.

John.


author: Theodora Boudale
body: Hi John,

I looked into the billing details of the workspace you selected when you created this community question. This workspace was indeed on a paid billing plan. However, there was an issue with the payment 3 months ago and as a result, the plan of the workspace was downgraded to the Free one 2 months ago. We normally send an email in these cases to the person that is listed as Billing contact for a license at <https://my.atlassian.com/products/index>

I would suggest contacting the credit card provider (of the credit card you use in Bitbucket Cloud) to figure out what the problem was. You can always upgrade back to the paid billing plan you had from **Workspace settings** \> **Plan details**. Please make sure you also look into the credit card issue, so that your workspace's plan doesn't get downgraded to Free again.

If I am looking at the correct workspace, the issue you reported is occurring because the workspace's plan was downgraded to the Free one. If that didn't happen, you wouldn't have an issue making the repo private.

The number of users on the plan is done when making a repo private because we only count the users with access to private repos. In your public repos, you can add as many users as you like.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions or if you need further assistance.

Kind regards,  
Theodora


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