Enhanced billing platform - feedback

[gmondello]

Summary

This discussion is a placeholder for feedback from the changelog post about the enhanced billing platform for enterprises. For specific billing questions or issues, please contact your account representative or support.

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. Benefits of the new platform include:

• Cost allocation - create cost centers to allocate spend to different Azure subscriptions
• Spend transparency - view usage for organizations, repositories, products, cost centers, and SKUs by hour, day, month, or year
• Improved control - set budgets to limit spending and configure alerts to stay informed of budget utilization

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[NinoCapo]

Hi @gmondello, I noticed the bullet on cost centers being billed to different Azure Subs. Do you know if we'll be able to target specific Resource Groups within a single subscription?

[gmondello]

hi @NinoCapo that's not possible today, but is on our radar. No firm commitments for when, though.

[satya2p]

@gmondello We are set to get new enhanced billing experience on December 09, 2024. Is it possible to schedule this report or use an API to download it for better usability ?

[gmondello]

@gmondello We are set to get new enhanced billing experience on December 09, 2024. Is it possible to schedule this report or use an API to download it for better usability ?

There's no current ability to schedule a usage report, but there is an API:

By organization:
https://docs.github.com/en/rest/billing/enhanced-billing?apiVersion=2022-11-28#get-billing-usage-report-for-an-organization

For the entire enterprise:
https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/rest/enterprise-admin/billing?apiVersion=2022-11-28#get-billing-usage-report-for-an-enterprise

[matt-buchanan]

Just digging into this now in our enterprise deployment - so far it's hitting the spot, seems really well thought out.

It would be good to understand when we might see a bit more API support to allow us to manage cost centres at scale:

• Ability to add/remove repos to a cost centre via API
• Creation/lifecycle of cost centres, including associating cost centres with Azure subscriptions

On a similar note, it would also be useful to be able to pass in a cost centre attribute via SCIM provisioning

Thanks

[gmondello]

hi @matt-buchanan thank you for the feedback. I can confirm both of the API limitations you mention are high priority within our backlog.

We haven't considered or looked at cost center attribution at SCIM provisioning, but we are exploring ways to make cost center assignment more automated. I'll make note of this specifically. Thank you!

[matt-buchanan]

Hi @gmondello - was just wondering if we were any closer to these APIs? I've been manually setting up cost centers but it's a bit arduous - in particular, the repo selection process is pretty painful if you are wanting to add more than 10 repos to a cost center, would be a lot easier if we could do this via API calls.

[gmondello]

hi @matt-buchanan - sorry for the tardiness. We are closer, but not able to share a date yet. If we offer a preview for this, I'll circle back and ask for your help to test!

[leandromsft]

I would like to commend you on the new billing feature. The option to manually select which repositories will be part of each cost center is very useful for financial management.

However, I have a custom property called SquadName when creating repositories, and I would like to create a cost center for all repositories of a specific squad and associate it with an Azure subscription. In this case, it would be great to have the ability to select repositories via custom properties when creating a cost center.

Thank you for your excellent work and continuous innovation on the platform. Keep it up!

[gmondello]

hi @leandromsft 👋 - Managing cost centers via repo properties is on our roadmap, but not with a committed date.

[smoneyan]

I noticed that Copilot usage data is not included in Get billing usage report for an enterprise API.

Usage report has this data. It would be good to have this data in the API too.

[RV-LACity]

We’re excited about the new billing platform as it’s a much needed improvement that aligns perfectly with our organization’s goal of separating Copilot costs across different subscriptions.

Currently, it appears that users can only be added to cost centers via the API.
Are there plans to support selecting individual users or teams through the UI? Or perhaps support for adding Teams using API?

[gmondello]

Hi @RV-LACity 👋 Yes! We will soon support adding users via the UI.

Teams integration is further down the road.

We are running a private preview of the cost center API. Basically CrUD cost centers and their resources (orgs, repos, users). Let me know if you would like to participate.

[RV-LACity]

Hi @gmondello ,
I'm definitely interested in participating in the preview feature. Could you let me know the next steps? Should I coordinate with you directly, or would it be better to go through our assigned enterprise sales manager?

[gmondello]

@RV-LACity please do reach out to your enterprise sales contact!

[matt-buchanan]

@RV-LACity please do reach out to your enterprise sales contact!

Hi - I'm also hoping to join this preview - we've got some relatively nice automation in place right now around user associations to cost centres, but I would love to be able to manage the full lifecycle from our provisioning process. Will reach out to our enterprise sales contact as well.