About per-user pricing
The foundation of your bill is the number of standard licensed seats that you choose for your enterprise.
GitHub uses a unique-user licensing model. For enterprise products that include multiple deployment options, GitHub determines how many licensed seats you're consuming based on the number of unique users across all your deployments.
Each user account only consumes one license, no matter how many GitHub Enterprise Server instances the user account uses, or how many organizations the user account is a member of on GitHub Enterprise Cloud. This model allows each person to use multiple GitHub Enterprise deployments without incurring extra costs.
To ensure the same user isn't consuming more than one license for multiple enterprise deployments, you can synchronize license usage between your GitHub Enterprise Server and GitHub Enterprise Cloud environments. For more information, see "About licenses for GitHub Enterprise."
In addition to licensed seats, your bill may include other charges, such as GitHub Advanced Security. For more information, see "About billing for your enterprise."
People that consume a license
Each person consumes one license, and GitHub identifies individuals by primary email address.
GitHub bills for the following people.
- Organization members, including owners
- Outside collaborators on private repositories owned by your organization, excluding forks
- Anyone with a pending invitation to become an organization owner or member
- Anyone with a pending invitation to become an outside collaborator on private repositories owned by your organization, excluding forks
- Dormant users
GitHub does not bill for any of the following people.
- Organization billing managers
- Anyone with a pending invitation to become an organization billing manager
- Anyone with a pending invitation to become an outside collaborator on a public repository owned by your organization
- Suspended users
Note: If an invitee does not accept the invitation within seven days, the pending invitation expires automatically. After expiration, GitHub will no longer bill you for the pending invitation.
For more information, see "Roles in an enterprise" or "Roles in an organization."
GitHub counts each member or outside collaborator once for billing purposes, even if the user account has membership in multiple organizations in an enterprise or access to multiple repositories owned by your organization. For more information about outside collaborators, see "Adding outside collaborators to repositories in your organization."
Suspended users are not counted when calculating the number of licensed users consuming seats. For more information, see "Suspending and unsuspending users."
Dormant users do occupy a seat license. As such, you can choose to suspend dormant users to release user licenses. For more information, see "Managing dormant users."
About changes to your subscription
You can add more licensed seats to your enterprise at any time. If you pay for more seats than are being used, you can also reduce the number of seats.
If you use an enterprise account on GitHub.com and have questions about changes to your subscription, contact GitHub's Sales team.