Mergify Billing System

This page explains how Mergify’s contributor-based billing works and how to read your invoice.

Many enterprise solutions charge per user, irrespective of actual usage. At Mergify, we firmly believe in billing you only for what you actively use.

This is why our billing system operates on the principle of contributors. Here’s how it works:

• A contributor is any user who opens a pull request or updates one. An update is any change to the pull request’s head branch: pushing commits to it, or updating it with the latest changes from its base branch. Mergify counts whoever performed the update, not necessarily the author of the commits it brought in. Other activity, such as reviewing, commenting on, closing, or reopening a pull request, does not make someone a contributor.

• Bot accounts are never contributors. A GitHub App or bot user that opens a pull request or updates one, such as a dependency updater, is skipped. So are web-flow, the account GitHub attributes web-editor commits to, and accounts that have since been deleted. Only real user accounts are counted.

• Each user is counted only once, even if they contribute to pull requests across multiple repositories.

• The system uses a 30-day sliding window. A user is counted as a contributor for 30 days after they open a pull request or update one. After that period, if they make no further contributions, they are no longer considered active for billing purposes.

• Usage is prorated to the day: if a contributor is seen active during 48 days, the system only bills for precisely 48 days, not 2 entire months.

If you don’t know the number of contributors that Mergify might count, you can use this script to estimate the number of contributors over the last 30 days.

1. Go to https://github.com/settings/tokens (or the equivalent page on your GitHub Enterprise Server installation, at https://<your-ghes-host>/settings/tokens) to create a token. The token must have the permissions to access the repository (read permission is enough);

2. Export the token as an environment variable with export GITHUB_TOKEN=<your-token>;

3. Install requests on your system by running python3 -m pip install requests;

4. Run the script with python3 mergify-count-contributors.py <repo1-url> <repo2-url> etc, passing the list of repositories where Mergify will be deployed. Use the full repository URLs, including the host, so the script can reach the right API endpoint (for example https://github.com/org/repo for GitHub.com or https://github.example.com/org/repo for GitHub Enterprise Server).

The script will run and print its progress. It can take several minutes for the script to complete depending on the number of repositories scanned and the number of active pull requests they have.

Mergify does not require an annual subscription (except for the Enterprise plan), but offers a large discount if you buy users in advance for a 12-month period.

An annual subscription allows you to buy a base number of seats (users) per product at the start of the year. If your usage goes beyond the pre-purchased seats, additional seats are billed monthly, prorated to the exact day of use.

For example, let’s say you have purchased an annual license for 100 users. If your number of users increases to 110 users during 45 days, you will be invoiced for 10 extra users over 45 days.

You can check your current usage on the Subscription page of the Mergify dashboard, under Settings → Subscription. The Usage row gives the number of repositories your plan covers and the number of active contributors.

The repository count takes you to your repositories list, and a button beside the contributor count opens the list of people counted for your plan.

When your plan carries several products, a Products row takes its place, with one line per product and a Total line that counts each contributor once.

On a plan carrying one product, a billing manager also gets a Seats row with the number of seats billed. An annual subscription splits that number between the seats you pre-purchased, shown as Committed, and the On-demand seats billed monthly on top of them. The Products row carries the same split, as two of its columns.

On some plans the Active Contributors count is headed Collaborators instead. It counts everyone with write access to a repository that has a Mergify product enabled, rather than only the people who contributed to it.

Products your plan does not cover are listed further down the page, under Not in Your Plan.

Billing managers cancel from the Cancel row of the Subscription page, and the row itself says which of two routes your subscription takes. When it offers Cancel Subscription, you cancel it yourself: the plan stops at the end of the period you have already paid for, it does not renew, and you can undo the cancellation until that date. When it offers Request Cancellation instead (a plan that runs for a fixed term, one that covers a larger team, one we no longer sell, or one that was set up with us), the row explains why and sends us your request, so we can settle the timing and any credit with you.

To switch between plans, contact our customer support. They’ll guide you through the process.

When you cancel, your subscription stays active until the end of the billing period you already paid for, and it does not renew. You may still receive one last invoice on that final day (see Final Invoice After Cancellation below).

A single invoice usually mixes two things: an adjustment for the period that just ended, and the charge for the period that is starting. The adjustment is there because the number of contributors Mergify counts can change any day. Cancelling your subscription produces one more invoice, which works differently and is covered last.

Mergify keeps the number of seats on your subscription in step with the number of contributors it counts. Every time that count changes, the adjustment is prorated: you are credited for the seats you had already paid for over the rest of the period, then charged for the new count over those same days. Both lines show up on your next invoice, labeled “unused time” and “remaining time” by our payment provider, so only the difference between them changes your total.

The rest of the invoice charges the period that is about to start, based on your user count on the day it is issued. If that count changes during the period, the next invoice carries the same kind of adjustment.

Say example-org is billed on the 1st of each month at $10 per user per month and has 20 contributors. Two more contributors push commits on April 16th, halfway through the period. The invoice issued on May 1st then reads:

The first two lines are the real-time user adjustment: half of April is credited back at the old count, and the same half is re-charged at the new one. The $10 difference is what the two extra contributors cost for the time they were counted. The third line is the upcoming period, at the count you have on the day the invoice is issued.

When you cancel your subscription, it stays active until the end of the billing period you already paid for, then ends without renewing. You may still receive one last invoice dated on that final day.

That last invoice covers your final billing period, not a renewal. It collects the real-time user adjustments described above: when your user count changes mid-period, the prorated difference is only settled on the next invoice, which for a cancelled subscription is the final one, issued when the period ends. So if your team grew during your last month, that growth is billed on the day your subscription ends. Once you pay it, you won’t be charged again.

By understanding how your invoices are built, you can more easily interpret and anticipate how changes in your contributors influence your Mergify charges.