Changes to Unregistered User Billing on Committed Plans

Announcements
1

We’re updating how we bill for unregistered users. For customers on annual committed plans, starting April 2026, each unregistered user will be counted individually toward your monthly active user total.

What’s changing

Currently, when contributors make commits or changes in CircleCI without logging in first, they appear as unregistered users in your account. Our system has been counting all unregistered users collectively as a single billable user per month, regardless of the actual number of unique contributors.

We’re making this change to ensure accurate billing that reflects your organization’s true usage patterns. Each unique unregistered user will be included in your monthly active user total, aligning with how registered users are billed.

Current pricing structure remains unchanged:

  • Scale Plan: 40,000 credits/user/month
  • Custom Plan: 25,000 credits/user/month

Where to view your usage: Navigate to Plan → Usage → User in your CircleCI dashboard. Unregistered users appear with [unregistered users] next to their names.

Security controls for unregistered users

The prevent feature will help you manage builds under your organization:

  1. Go to the Usage Controls tab in your account settings
  2. Locate the “Prevent unregistered user spend” toggle
  3. Enable it (turns blue when active) to block builds from unregistered users. This feature takes effect immediately once enabled.

Next steps

  1. Review your current usage: Check Plan → Usage → User to identify any unregistered users
  2. Evaluate your options: Decide whether to enable the prevention toggle and encourage contributors to create accounts
  3. Plan accordingly: Consider how this change might affect your monthly billing.

Questions and support

Your account teams will be happy to help you with any additional questions. For additional information about user management and billing, visit our Support Portal.

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It looks like you are really scraping the bottom of the barrel at the cost of your customers for this. This will backfire on you in the long run, if it hasn’t already. It’s a rushed change where you can’t really even get the date right. You also provide no controls to manage it, and it’s easily abused (e.g., pushing commits with random usernames, e.g. circleci triggering builds through workflows). The only option is to ban all “bots”, but then you can’t really have bots since there’s no feature to allow them (Allow users to add bots to an allowlist to avoid being blocked as an unregistered user | Feature Requests | CircleCI Ideas)

GH Actions team is probably having a party :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Hello Marius,

I understand your frustration. Our communications could have been better. In regards to functional controls, I really appreciate that you shared our Ideas Board so others can see this feature request. Improved controls for organizations to understand user billing is currently with our Product development team. I located your ticket with our Customer Success team and added myself as a follower. I’m confident we can make this better.