Introduction to GitHub's Enhanced Billing Platform

[luispujols]

Introduction to GitHub's Enhanced Billing Platform

As your organization grows on GitHub Enterprise, so does the need for transparent and efficient billing management. The Enhanced Billing Platform represents a significant improvement in how administrators can track, manage, and optimize spending across their GitHub Enterprise resources.

What Is the Enhanced Billing Platform?

The Enhanced Billing Platform is a suite of new features designed to help administrators understand and manage GitHub spend for their enterprise. Unlike the previous billing system, this new platform provides granular visibility into your usage patterns and spending, allowing for more informed decision-making.

Key Features and Benefits

📊 Detailed Usage Analytics

The platform breaks down your usage by:

• Organizations
• Repositories
• Products (GitHub Actions, GitHub Codespaces, etc.)
• Cost Centers

This granularity helps pinpoint exactly where your resources are being utilized and eliminates the guesswork from your billing analysis. You are able to visualize month-over-month cost comparisons and analyze historical usage patterns within the last year.

🏢 Cost Center Management

For larger organizations with multiple teams or departments, the platform introduces the concept of cost centers that allow you to:

• Group organizations and repositories by department
• Allocate budgets to specific business units
• Track spending against those budgets
• Create accountability for resource usage

This feature is particularly valuable for organizations implementing chargeback models or needing departmental cost breakdowns.

Accessing the Enhanced Billing Platform

Getting started is pretty straightforward:

1. Sign in to your GitHub Enterprise Cloud account
2. For enterprise accounts:
   • Navigate to your enterprise settings
   • Select "Billing & Licensing" from the menu
3. For organizations:
   • Go to your organization's settings
   • Select "Billing & Licensing" in the sidebar

Once there, you'll see the new interface with dashboards, reports, and management tools that weren't available in the previous billing system.

Coming Up Next

In our next post, we'll dive deeper into understanding how to take control of your spending through cost centers, budgets, and alerts. We'll also cover the different roles and permissions within the billing platform.

Made with ❤️ by Luis Pujols

[boredland]

Hi there! Previously one could easily determine, via the APIs, which fraction of the included minutes has been used. With the new billing platform API, I don't think this is possible easily, because public repo usage is listed identically to private repo usage and because the "included" minutes aren't listed anywhere. Is there a way to still find that out without knowing which repos are private/public and without knowing which tier of included minutes the organization has?

[boredland]

Alternatively: is it still possible to use the old API?

[boredland]

Also, I think this part of the docs is misleading

"included_minutes": This is now represented as a $ amount via discountAmount.

As I read discountAmount, it represents the amount of discounted $ as a fraction of the netAmount. Which isn't the same, as AFAIK included_minutes represented the amount of available minutes in the organization.

[gmondello]

hi @boredland 👋 thanks for your feedback here. Unfortunately it's not possible to still use the old API, and I'm afraid we don't have a great answer for an alternative API that will answer what you're looking for.

I've opened an issue to track this request on our backlog.

(Internal GitHub link): Provide an API for customers to be able to query included usage

[gmondello]

@boredland Would an endpoint that returns something like the following suffice?

Add a new endpoint that accepts either an enterprise slug, organization name, or user name and returns the following:

{
  "included_usage": [
    {
      "product": "actions runners",
      "included_usage": "$400.00"
      "included_usage_used":"$400.00"
      "remaining_included_usage":"$0.00"
    },
    {
      "product": "actions storage",
      "included_usage": "$12.50"
      "included_usage_used":"$11.94"
      "remaining_included_usage":"$0.56"
    },    
   {
      "product": "git_lfs_bandwidth",
      "included_usage": "$21.87"
      "included_usage_used":"$0.03"
      "remaining_included_usage":"$21.84"
    },
...

[boredland]

That would be perfect for our use-case!