Manage budgets and track usage with new billing API updates

[queenofcorgis]

We're expanding our billing APIs with new capabilities to help you programmatically manage budgets, track usage, and access cost center data.

Manage budgets via APIs

You can now manage the full lifecycle of budgets via API. Previously, budgets could only be managed through the UI. Now, you can programmatically create, update, and delete budgets, as well as adjust the budget amount and alert notifications. There is currently a temporary limit of 50 budgets per account. This API is now available in public preview.

For more details, refer to our documentation on REST API endpoints for budgets.

Track usage with the new Usage summary API

The new Usage summary API allows you to retrieve usage information for your entire account or filter by specific organizations, repositories, cost centers, products, or SKUs. Usage can be queried by year, month, or day. This API is now available in public preview.

For more details, refer to our documentation on the Usage summary REST API endpoint.

Additional improvements

• Cost center API improvement: The Get all cost centers for an enterprise API now includes an optional state parameter, which allows you to only get active cost centers by adding ?state=active when calling the endpoint.
• Usage report API changes: We've removed the hour parameter from the existing usage report API and reduced the granularity of the response when using the day parameter to provide daily totals instead of hourly breakdowns. For more details, refer to our documentation on the Get billing usage report for an enterprise REST API endpoint.

Who can use these features

• Enterprise owners and billing managers on GitHub Enterprise plans.
• Organization owners on GitHub Team plans.
• Individuals on personal plans.

We're keen to hear your thoughts: share them below along with any questions or feedback 🚀 .

[Subhadip956425]

This is an excellent update, particularly for businesses that oversee several organisations and cost centres.
Automation and cost optimisation will be much simpler with the new Budget Management API and Usage Summary API.

The main advantages I see:

uses scripts or internal dashboards to enable automated budget alerts and adjustments.

eliminates the need for manual exports and streamlines monthly usage tracking across numerous teams.

Cleaner reporting is greatly enhanced by the new?state=active filter for cost centres.

A few brief enquiries:

When budgets are exceeded, will webhooks or event-based alerts be supported?

Will the Usage Summary API data be directly integrated into GraphQL APIs or GitHub Insights for unified analytics?

All things considered, this is a significant step towards improved DevOps governance and financial visibility on GitHub.

[ccampo]

I think the usage summary API is nice but its not an equal replacement for the existing usage API. We need usage data to distribute costs for Github Actions and codespaces between projects. So the approach is to annotate Repos with appid and then get the usage data for every repo and then split the total cost based on the gross amount from the usagedata.
The existing API was doing that perfectly well but now that we have reached 2K repos it runs into timeouts. The proposed solution is to move to the summary api and passing the repos as parameter. So 1 call explods into 2000 API calls. And then we merge the result together as one data structure.
Not sure why that is a progress...

[gmondello]

hi @ccampo 👋 - You're right to point out that the summary endpoint is not a for-like replacement of the existing usage API. Having said that, the summary endpoint provides customers with the flexibility to query/filter usage flexibly.

Having said that, we know we need to provide a better way to get the full usage report, and we're working to do so. In short, we'll provide an API that allows you to request the same reports that can be requested via the UI (those listed here). Would that satisfactorily address your feedback?

Regarding the repos and showback or chargeback of those costs - have you explored using cost centers to do that for you? That way you wouldn't have to calculate or "process" the usage information, you just add the repositories to the cost centers and all associated usage can be shown or charged back accordingly. More here: https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/billing/concepts/cost-centers

[sitta07]

These updates are a game-changer! The ability to manage budgets programmatically will save a lot of time and improve flexibility, especially with the new alert notifications. The addition of the Usage summary API is also fantastic for tracking resource usage at a more granular level. Looking forward to exploring the new cost center API improvements as well. These features will definitely streamline the billing and usage management process. Great job man

[gmondello]

hi @sitta07 👋 - We appreciate the feedback! We've just this past week increased the budget limit from 50 to 10,000 budgets per account.

We'll soon be similarly scaling the maximum number of cost centers as well as making it possible via API to generate the exact same .csv usage reports available in the UI.

[danabadarneh]

Thanks for sharing this update! 🚀

The new billing APIs look very useful, especially the ability to manage budgets programmatically and track usage with more flexible filters. This will definitely help teams and individuals get better visibility into costs and automate billing management.

The Usage summary API and the cost center improvements are great additions as well. Looking forward to trying these features during the public preview. Thanks to the team for the continuous improvements!

[jer-k]

Is there any information on when the usage API's will be available to GitHub App installations? I see that the documentation for both /enterprises/{enterprise}/settings/billing/usage and /enterprises/{enterprise}/settings/billing/usage/summary (from this link https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/rest/billing/usage?apiVersion=2022-11-28) have the following

This endpoint does not work with GitHub App user access tokens, GitHub App installation access tokens, or fine-grained personal access tokens.

Is there a reason for this? I have implemented getting regular organization costs via the usage APIs through a GitHub App installation (https://github.com/apps/billing-vantage-sh). We now have customers who are on Enterprise and would like us to fetch their costs as well.

[viduszekabb]

Hey! Thanks for sharing APIs for budgets!

[FIXED]
It looks like fetching all budgets for an enterprise does not work correctly. The endpoint is only returning 10 records and GitHub's standard pagination doesn't seem to solve the issue.
https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/rest/billing/budgets?apiVersion=2022-11-28*get-all-budgets

[sophiederosa]

@viduszekabb hey! here's a screenshot showing the configuration to get pagination to work, let me know if you're able to get things working with this setup, or what other issues you might be having.

[viduszekabb]

This helped, thank you! :)

[AzizSafi2003]

This is a fantastic update — and honestly, a big step forward for teams that care about financial visibility and automation. 🚀

Being able to manage the full budget lifecycle via API is a game changer. Automating budget creation, updates, and alert configurations means we can now integrate billing controls directly into internal tooling, CI/CD workflows, or governance systems. No more manual UI-only management — this unlocks real DevFinOps possibilities.

The temporary 50-budget limit per account seems reasonable for preview, especially for enterprises that want to experiment with cost segmentation strategies before scaling.

The new Usage Summary API is particularly powerful. The ability to filter by organization, repository, cost center, product, or SKU makes it much easier to build custom dashboards, generate internal chargebacks, and monitor cost trends at multiple levels of granularity. Querying by year, month, or day provides flexibility for both executive reporting and operational monitoring.

The cost center API enhancement is also a thoughtful improvement — being able to filter by ?state=active simplifies automation logic and reduces unnecessary data handling. Small change, big practical impact.

Regarding the usage report API update: while the removal of hourly granularity may impact some fine-grained monitoring use cases, daily totals often align better with financial reconciliation workflows and simplify reporting pipelines.

Overall, this feels like a strong move toward giving teams more programmable control over billing data. It makes GitHub billing much more automation-friendly and enterprise-ready.

A few thoughts / questions:

Are there plans to increase the 50-budget limit after preview?

Will webhooks or event notifications for budget thresholds be introduced?

Any roadmap for exporting usage data directly to external BI systems?

Excited to see how this evolves — great work to the team building this! 🙌