We’re updating how we bill for unregistered users. Starting on December 1, 2025, 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:
Free and Performance plans: 5 free active users included
Additional users: Look at plans for per user pricing beyond your free allowance
Where to view your usage: Navigate to Plan → Usage → User in your CircleCI dashboard. Unregistered users appear with [unregistered users] next to their names.
Take control of your costs
The prevent feature will help you manage unregistered user spend:
Go to the Usage Controls tab in your account settings
Locate the “Prevent unregistered user spend” toggle
Enable it (turns blue when active) to block builds from unregistered users. This feature takes effect immediately once enabled.
Next steps
Review your current usage: Check Plan → Usage → User to identify any unregistered users
Evaluate your options: Decide whether to enable the prevention toggle and encourage contributors to create accounts
Plan accordingly: Consider how this change might affect your monthly billing.
Questions and support
For additional information about user management and billing, visit our Support Portal.
CircleCI continues to offer our Free plan, which provides access to a wide variety of resources and Enterprise-grade CI/CD features. Our free plan includes 5 active users/month.
@oliviertassinari just to add on to what @kami was mentioning. If you have a project that has the OSS enabled in the project settings, you should not be impacted by the change above. You can still use CircleCI as your CI/CD system for open source projects and those unregistered users, who might raise a PR, would not count towards your seats.
If we are using “custom (inbound) webhooks,” which run on CircleCI as an unregistered user, how will calls to webhooks affect the number of distinct unregistered users for billing purposes as described in this announcement? For example, do all custom webhooks run as the same unregistered CircleCI user, or will each custom webhook get assigned a different unregistered user? (Obviously, it wouldn’t work if each call to a webhook creates a new unregistered user, as it would mean that each webhook call would cost 25,000 credits.) Thanks!
Hello Chris - Our understanding is webhooks would be associated with the same user. If you are using a lot of webhooks, you might consider setting them up under a registered user so it is easier to identify and manage in the app. If you could provide some examples to billing@circleci.com, we can confirm how this is handled and offer you an estimate of what charges may look like after October 31.
Thanks, @kami. I think things are settled now. I initially got concerned when a number of things happened all around the same time:
I tried using a custom webhook for the first time.
I saw two unregistered users show up on our Usage panel (I was expecting 1).
We exceeded our monthly credits due to the extra users.
This Announcement about billing changes and unregistered users was posted to the Discussion Board within a week of the above happening.
Now I think it was mostly a coincidence. We’ve continued using the custom webhook (there’s just one of them), and I haven’t seen more unregistered users added to the usage panel.