Bitbucket: "Your push failed because the account has exceeded its user limit"
Bitbucket Cloud has made the private repositories of this workspace read-only: nothing can be written to them until the workspace is back within its plan. Your commits did not reach Bitbucket; they are still in your local repository. Find which of three causes it is, fix it in the workspace, and push again.
The whole message
As Atlassian's article Fix error "Your push failed because the account has exceeded its user limit" shows it:
remote: [ALERT] Your push failed because the account 'username' has exceeded its user limit and this repository is restricted to read-only access. To restore write access, ask an account administrator to upgrade their plan.
A more recent question on Atlassian Community quotes it with a link to the workspace's plans:
[ALERT] Change your plan to restore write access: [ALERT] https://bitbucket.org/<workspace>/workspace/settings/plans
Over HTTPS, Git may show only the status: The requested URL returned error: 402 (402 is "Payment Required"). The name in quotes is the workspace, not your own account.
The three causes
| Cause | How to tell | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| More users than the plan: over 5 on Free, or over the number bought on an annual Standard or Premium plan | Workspace settings › User directory, filtered to users on plan; the plan's limit is in Plan details | Remove users from the workspace, or upgrade the plan |
| The plan's payment failed three times, so Bitbucket moved the workspace down to Free, and it has more than 5 users | The workspace's billing contact got an email for each declined payment | Update the card (in Bitbucket's plan and billing settings or at my.atlassian.com), then upgrade the plan again yourself: Atlassian says the renewal then goes through |
| Atlassian deactivated the free workspace as unused (no activity for 6 months), even with one user | Your avatar › All workspaces shows a box with a link to deactivated workspaces | A workspace admin restores it from that list |
Sources: the first two are from Atlassian's article above. The third is from Atlassian's announcement Bitbucket cleanup of free unused workspaces (deactivations from January 15, 2026; the self-recovery list added on March 23, 2026) and a Community question where a free workspace with one user got this message: Bitbucket Cloud Support answered that it was this cleanup and reactivated the workspace, which had not been deleted yet. The announcement says workspaces still deactivated after May 15, 2026 are deleted with their content.
Who counts as a user
- Since October 31, 2023, every member of the workspace is a user on the plan, whether or not they can open a private repository (Atlassian's billing change). Before that, only people with access to a private repository counted.
- Removing someone from a repository or a project does not free a place: they can still be a workspace member, for example through a group without access to anything. Remove them from the workspace in Workspace settings › User directory (Atlassian's article).
- Public repositories can have any number of collaborators; the limit is about the workspace's members.
Other reasons a repository is read-only
Atlassian's Why is my repository in "read-only" mode? lists two more: the repository is over 4 GB ("Repository is over the size limit"), or Bitbucket is doing maintenance or storage work on it, which usually lasts a few minutes: push again a little later.
Bitbucket pull requests in IntelliJ IDEA
Pull Request Inbox for Bitbucket, a plugin by Lesstep for JetBrains IDEs 2024.1 or later, lists the pull requests that wait for your review on Bitbucket Cloud and Data Center, with diffs and discussions in the IDE. It signs in with your own Atlassian API token and does not change who is on your Bitbucket plan. The review inbox is free; approving, commenting and merging are Pro (US$1.50 a month, with a 30-day trial).
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