GitHub Actions Billing: Adding clarifying language to help docs

[tboneATL]

Issue overview

A question came up in the Central Sales slack channel (we're mostly focused on Enterprise sales, FYI):

Question: Does anyone know if GH Actions charged by the “calendar” month, ie. 1st through 30th, 15th to 15th.. or date of subscription start + 30 days?

I went to the help docs, thinking I could find the answer here. I quickly found this passage:

At the end of the month, GitHub calculates the cost of minutes and storage used over the amount included in your account. For example, if your organization uses GitHub Team and allows unlimited spending, using 15,000 minutes could have a total storage and minute overage cost of $56, depending on the operating systems used to run jobs.

Based on the first sentence, I was sure that the answer was at the end of the calendar month. One of my colleagues replied that one of his customers saw their minutes refresh on the 8th of the month...

So, I think there should be some clarifying language to prevent this misinterpretation. Looking at some other subscription-type services (like a cell phone carrier), it's common to see language like

Your data will reset (as indicated above) at midnight on the last day of your billing cycle.
Your new billing cycle (and new data allowance) begins at midnight on the first day of your next billing cycle.

I did find this page that talks about how to find your billing date, but this really only talks about when your next bill is due, which might be monthly or annually (most Enterprise customers are on an annual plan).

I suggest "At the end of the month" be changed to something like "At the end of your monthly billing cycle" or something to that effect.

I've not had many customers really dig into actions yet, but that's about to change as I have 2 large customers that are about to rollout GHEC for 9k users (combined) and Actions is in their plans. As their Account Manager, I want to avoid any nightmares or misunderstandings around overages, etc based in misinterpretations. 🙏

I was going to try and take a swing at a PR on this topic, but I don't have permission to create a branch in this repo, so opening this issue instead.

Products affected by this issue

to be completed by the core product docs team first responder

• Dotcom (all products)
  • GitHub Free
  • GitHub Pro
  • GitHub Team
• GitHub Enterprise Cloud
• GitHub Enterprise Server (Versions: )
• API
• Desktop

Note: The doctocat who triages this issue may invite you to open a PR to address it. Doing so is absolutely not required, though it's helpful for a speedy fix! Someone from our team will work with you to take your changes across the finish line.

/cc @github/product-docs-core

[tboneATL]

@docs/engineering

Friendly bump

[rachmari]

@tboneATL the help.github.com issue is actually in the github/help-docs repo. I've opened up https://github.com/github/help-docs/issues/13863 to get this fixed up! 🚀

I think we can close this out in favor of https://github.com/github/help-docs/issues/13863.