Your Confluence approval macro started asking for a licence

If you have been running page approvals in Confluence Cloud on a free app and recently saw a message like "You do not have a valid license. Please contact your space administrator", you are not doing anything wrong. Several free approval apps have moved to paid plans, and one of the most widely installed announced a "planned transition to a paid model" in October 2024. Approvals stop working, and pages that were approved are suddenly in limbo.

This page is here to help you decide what to do next — including when the answer is not our app.

First, check what you actually lost

Before choosing a replacement, look at what your team was really using:

1. Just a badge? Someone clicks Approve and readers can see the page was signed off. Most apps do this, including free tiers.
2. A workflow? Draft → review → approve → publish, with states, transitions and notifications. This is a much bigger job.
3. An audit record? You need to show an auditor who approved what and when — and, critically, that the approved content has not changed since.

Those are three different products. Buying the wrong one is the expensive mistake, not the licence fee.

The Confluence approvals options, honestly

Public Marketplace ratings and installs, as of 2 September 2026. We did not write these numbers and we have not filtered them.

Prices are the published Marketplace rate for 200 users, monthly equivalent.

If you need a full workflow engine — multi-stage states, transitions, conditional routing, publishing to other spaces — or if you need version-bound approval inside such a workflow, then look at Comala, AURA Workflow & Approval or Workflows for Confluence before you look at us. Both are well rated by people using them for exactly that, and Approval Seal does not do it. We would rather say so here than waste your evaluation time.

If you need read-receipts — proof that staff have read and understood a policy — QC Read and Understood is built for that specific job.

If you need recurring document review dates, Breeze is built around that.

If your free approval macro just started charging you

The most-installed approval app in Confluence Cloud announced a "planned transition to a paid model" in October 2024. Its own reviewers recorded what that felt like — "it's no longer free to use", "You do not have a valid license. Please contact your space administrator", "the approval workflow is terminated".

If that is you, the useful thing to know is that you are now choosing between paid apps anyway, and the price you were avoiding is no longer a reason to stay. One reviewer put the trade-off exactly, back in 2023:

"status 'approved' doesn't change if you publish a new version of the page … Nice gimmick to change the status — but not usable in a professional environment. There are better apps — but they come with a price tag …"

That price tag now applies either way. Approval Seal is $100/mo at 200 users — less than the app you are being asked to pay for, and less than every alternative in the table above except one rated 2.29 and one that does a different job. We are the cheapest because we do the least, not because we are a loss-leader: one behaviour, done properly, priced as one thing.

Where Approval Seal fits — and where it does not

Being straight about something we got wrong. We used to describe version-bound approval — an approval that stops counting when the page is edited — as the thing that set us apart. Having read the competing documentation properly, that is not true, and we would rather correct it here than let you discover it in an evaluation:

• Comala fires an updated transition when content is "edited and published (changing the Confluence page version)", returning the page to a draft or review state.
• Approvals for Confluence (AppFox) offers Expire on Edit, which reverts an approval to pending, and a Reset on Edit option.
• AURA cycles edited pages back through the approval workflow.

If version-bound approval is what you need and you are already happy with any of those, stay where you are. They are mature, well-rated products and they do this properly.

What is actually different about Approval Seal is scope and setup, not that one behaviour:

• Nothing to author. There is no workflow to design, no states, no transitions, no scripting. Install it, and pages carry a version-bound approval badge. The apps above are workflow engines — more powerful, and a configuration project before they are useful.
• Runs on Atlassian. No servers of ours, no network calls outside Atlassian, no external processing of your page content.
• Priced as one thing, because it is one thing, rather than as a document management suite.

The population we are actually built for is narrower than we first claimed: teams that want an approval to visibly stop counting when the page changes, and do not want to run a document-management workflow to get it. One reviewer of the largest free approval app asked for exactly that in October 2024: "you should block rights to update a approved page!" We take the other half of it — we do not block the edit, because people need to fix documents; we make the approval visibly stop counting.

What Approval Seal does not do

Stated up front, because a compliance buyer will find out anyway:

• No multi-approver quorum configuration
• No space-level policy or org-wide dashboard
• No workflow states, transitions or conditional routing
• Live Docs are not yet covered

It is one report of record, done thoroughly, priced as one thing rather than as a suite.

Not a compliance certification

Approval Seal provides features your own validated process can use. It does not certify your organisation against ISO 9001, ISO 13485, SOC 2, 21 CFR Part 11 or any other standard, and no such claim is made.

Moving over

There is no import step, because there is nothing to import: approvals are granted going forward against current page versions. Install it, and the pages you approve from then on carry a version-bound seal.

Questions, including "would this actually cover our audit?" — write to support@bobook.club and you will get a straight answer from the people who built it, including "no" where that is the honest answer.