Team members include: Owners, Collaborators, Git Contributors
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I have two questions regarding billing for Git contributors:
What happens when a project has many one-off Git contributors? These are people that may open a PR once (which triggers a build), but never again? We also have content for some websites in json and md files, which is edited by arbitrary members of the marketing team, who would also be counted as git contributers, rapidly inflating the billing for relatively small projects.
We’re using Netlify CMS and Netlify Identity to log in. This creates PRs in Github any time content edits are needed, but from many arbitrary people in the org who are not developers, but get counted as git contributors.
Does our usage of Netlify + Netlify CMS + Github match the intended architecture and billing model from Netlify? Because this doesn’t seem too sustainable, and surely it would bump highly non-enterprise accounts into enterprise in an unfair way?
Is there anything that could be done, considering the details of this use case?
What happens when a project has many one-off Git contributors? These are people that may open a PR once (which triggers a build), but never again? We also have content for some websites in json and md files, which is edited by arbitrary members of the marketing team, who would also be counted as git contributers, rapidly inflating the billing for relatively small projects.
They will be counted as a Git Contributor but only charged for the billing periods they are active. In this case, if they made a single PR on a particular day they’ll only count for that specific billing period.
Netlify only intends to charge you for team seats for builds triggered by commits we build directly from git notifications from your git provider. While we will not be able to provide tech support on how to work around our pricing system, some workflows that will not add to your account’s seat count include:
Configuring Netlify not to build non-production branches for your site(s). If teammates only commit to those branches, they will not trigger builds and thus will not require seats on your Netlify team.
Configuring Netlify not to build Pull Requests/Merge Requests for your site(s). Note that the user who merges a PR or MR will be counted as Netlify team seats; users who have commits in the PR will not be.
All commits on public repositories (aka: non-private repos) should all build without costing extra team members or requiring any configuration change.
You can remove current team members who do not need access to our UI. This way you only need to pay for a seat in the months an individual makes a commit.
Finally, for more tips on optimizing which builds happen on Netlify, we have an article around configuring builds in our Support Forums that might be of interest.
We’re using Netlify CMS and Netlify Identity to log in. This creates PRs in Github any time content edits are needed, but from many arbitrary people in the org who are not developers, but get counted as git contributors.
This is true. However, due to the way NetlifyCMS connects to Netlify, you can work around these extra GC charges by inviting non-git emails to your Identity instance. If you invite a non-git email (needs to be a “valid” email so the person can confirm and login), when that person makes changes on NetlifyCMS, they will be doing those changes on behalf of the git user that created the Identity connection. Since there is no Github (or any other git platform) email, we won’t count that as a Git Contributor since all actions made on Github will default to the original git user that made the connection as mentioned.
Thanks for the really helpful and explanatory response. I’m not trying to subvert Netlify billing by any means, just understand why billing is scaling faster than expected, and whether it was due to an architecture decision.
