The bill for each account on GitHub consists of the account's plan, plus other any other subscriptions and usage-based billing for the account. For organizations, the "plan" component of the bill is based on the number of licensed seats you choose to purchase.
New organizations on GitHub can build public and open-source projects with GitHub Free, or upgrade to a paid plan. See "GitHub’s plans" and "Upgrading your account's plan."
Note
Organizations who upgraded to a paid plan before May 11, 2016 can choose to stay on their existing per-repository plan or switch to per-user pricing. GitHub will notify you twelve months before any mandated change to your subscription. For more information on switching your subscription, see "Upgrading your account's plan."
People that consume a license
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 outside collaborator on private or internal repositories owned by your organization, excluding forks
- Dormant users
Note
- GitHub counts each outside collaborator once for billing purposes, even if the user account has access to multiple repositories owned by your organization.
- If an invitee does not accept the invitation within seven days, the pending invitation expires automatically.
- Inviting an outside collaborator to a repository using their email address temporarily uses an available seat, even if they already have access to other repositories. After they accept the invite, the seat will be freed up again. However, inviting them using their username does not temporarily use a seat.
GitHub does not bill for the following people:
- Billing managers
- Anyone with a pending invitation to become a billing manager
- Anyone with a pending invitation to become an outside collaborator on a public repository owned by your organization
About changes to your subscription
You can change your GitHub subscription at any time.
About changes for organizations on per-user plans
You can add more licensed seats to your organization at any time. If you pay for more seats than are being used, you can also reduce the number of seats. This only applies if you currently pay for your GitHub Enterprise licenses through a volume, subscription, or prepaid agreement. See "Upgrading your account's plan" and "Downgrading your account's plan."
If you have questions about your subscription, you can contact us through the GitHub Support portal.
To further support your team's collaboration abilities, you can upgrade to GitHub Enterprise Cloud, which includes features like SAML single sign-on and advanced auditing. For more information about how you can try GitHub Enterprise Cloud for free, see "Setting up a trial of GitHub Enterprise Cloud."
For more information about per-user pricing for GitHub Enterprise Cloud, see the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.
About changes for organizations on per-repository plans
You can upgrade or downgrade between legacy paid plans in your organization's billing settings. When you upgrade to a plan with more private repositories, GitHub immediately moves your account to your new plan and bills you for the difference in price, prorated for the number of days left in your billing cycle.
When you downgrade to a legacy paid plan with fewer private repositories, your new plan will take effect on your next billing date. If you have more private repositories than your new plan allows for, your private repositories will be locked when your new plan takes effect. To reduce your number of private repositories, you can make some of your private repositories public, or you can clone your private repositories locally and delete the copies on GitHub.