This is also affecting me. However, it seems that if I put the Jira internal directory first in the list of directories, then JSD creates the new user locally in the Jira directory and not in Crowd. This is a sufficient workaround for me.

I replaced the crowd with the keycloak.

This insane licensing scheme for Jira Service Desk when using Crowd is a megamonstrous nail in the Crowd coffin, but, hey Atlassian - it's your own choice to make   

Let me just add one more vote to this. With JSD and public signups enabled, using Crowd for authentication with anything other than the unrestricted user license opens us up to really simple denial-of-service attacks simply by registering a couple of accounts in JSD, thereby blocking new customer signups once the Crowd license hits its limit. 

Customers don't see Crowd as a single product; it's a piece of glue to tie other Atlassian applications together. Requiring a $10k+ license to enable proper SSO-based authentication for those products is insane from a business perspective. 

This issue will hit five (5) years. I don't think Atlassian will change it's mind on customers licensing with Crowd. The solution here will be to ditch Crowd completelly.

Hi, I think the same as Mohammed Amine.

Today I'm using keycloak as a customer manager, but sticking with the crowd managing operators and another system to manage customers is not feasible.

I am seriously considering migrating everything to keycloak and leaving the crowd.

I would prefer to get everything on a single platform from the same manufacturer, but if it is not possible, I am evaluating this migration.

It is really a must have. A client with 50 agents cannot pay for 500 clients ! Moreover if his customer base is growing it is really difficult to explain that he has to buy more licences for customers. No other service desk application is doing that. Please consider this suggestion urgency. 

Someone should take this issue serious...

Our organization just rolled out the service desk product on the premise that it would allow customers to submit requests w/out consuming our developer licenses in Jira, and while this is sort of true, since they are managed through Crowd this is not the case, this became apparent and painful to see as our Crowd licenses were unknowingly being consumed as new customers were signing up and consuming these licenses, as it stands we have 1 seat left after a day of release and to find this issue (which has been around for several years it seems is disheartening).  Please remove the dependency that customer accounts consume Crowd licenses, it is urgently needed and this will no doubt damage my advocacy of Atlassian products in my organization.

We've read in the latest Crowd release notes for 3.4 "We’re proud to present you SSO 2.0 - Crowd’s single point of access for Jira, Jira Service Desk, Bitbucket, and Confluence across different domains with one common login page." so I think that will stop the MIDAN Authenticator work around from being viable.
Our answer may be to go to the DC versions of the other products and use ADFS for SSO. As we can put as many customers as we want into AD and/or the local directory we may just have to drop crowd all together.