CircleCI active users and seats describes how the cloud plans charge for people. CircleCI explains the model as follows: credits cover access to compute, and “per-active-user fees cover access to platform features and job orchestration”, including dependency caching, artifact caching and workspaces.[2] Because the fee follows activity rather than a headcount of accounts, the number of chargeable users can differ from the number of people with a CircleCI login.
Editions
The three cloud plans treat users as follows.
| Plan | Users included | Additional users |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Up to 5 active users a month[5] | Charged at the additional per-user credit rate when active users exceed the included number[6] |
| Performance | 5 active users included free[5] | 25,000 credits per user per month, shown on the pricing page as USD 15 per month per additional user[1][5] |
| Scale | Custom seat count[6] | 40,000 credits per user per month on the price list[4] |
The plans overview calls the Performance seat model “scalable user seats”: the customer starts with a set number of active users and adds more as the team grows, with extra users charged at a per-user credit rate.[6] For Scale, the overview speaks of a “custom user seat count” in which limits are set “based on your organization’s needs”.[6] The price list is dated 2026-08-31.[4] Catalog rows: Free plan, Performance plan, Scale plan, and the rule Users beyond five cost 25,000 credits per month on Performance.
Metrics
CircleCI documents three user types.[1]
- A registered user has a CircleCI account created through sign-up. Registered users can view pipelines and build history, trigger and rerun builds, and, depending on role, reach organization settings.[1]
- An unregistered user has triggered builds or pipelines but has no CircleCI account. Typical cases are developers who commit to a connected repository but never log in, contributors whose pull requests trigger builds, and bot or service accounts.[1]
- An active user is “any user (registered or unregistered) who triggers the use of compute resources on non-OSS projects during a billing period”.[1]
The billing bridge is explicit: “each unregistered user within an organization is mapped to, and counts as, a single active user for billing purposes”.[1] The catalog rows are Active user, Unregistered user and the rule Each unregistered user counts as one active user.
What makes a user active
The documentation lists the activities that make a user active.[1][2]
- Commits that trigger builds, including pull request merge commits.
- Rerunning jobs in the web application, including SSH debug reruns.
- Approving on-hold jobs. The approver “will be considered the actor of all downstream jobs”.
- Using scheduled workflows.
- Machine users.
The list matters for reconciliation. An approval gate can make an approver active even if they never committed code, a scheduled workflow makes its actor active, and a machine user (a service identity that pushes commits) counts like a person.[1] The row Active user is anyone who triggers compute on non-open-source projects holds the evidence.
The contractual User
The Software as a Service Agreement, last updated 2026-04-07, uses a different, broader word. A “User” is “a discrete instance that Customer authorizes to run Jobs”, and CircleCI “determines Users based on available identity signals”. Users may include the customer, its Affiliates, employees, consultants, contractors, representatives and “human or automated agents or actors”. The definition then adds that “in limited cases, multiple identity signals from a single User may result in duplicate User counts”.[7] The agreement grants rights to the customer “and your Users”, so the same word is both a licence-scope term and, through the Order, the basis of seat charges.[7] The row is User (SaaS Agreement). A licence manager comparing CircleCI’s active user list with HR records should therefore expect differences caused by identities, not only by headcount.
Counting / floors
Billing period. Active users are tracked during a billing period, and the list is available to administrators under Plan, Plan Usage, Users in the web app.[1] Unregistered users appear there “with limited information”.[1]
Included users. On Free and Performance the first five active users are included. Beyond that, “additional active users beyond this limit are charged at 25,000 credits per user per month”.[1] Because 25,000 credits are sold for USD 15 on Performance, the pricing page converts this into USD 15 per month per extra user.[2][5] The Free plan treats additional users as chargeable at a per-user credit rate as well, which means the credit balance, not a separate invoice, pays for them.[6]
Open source. If a project is open source, “you will not be considered an active user”.[1] The open source credit allowance applies only to organizations on the Free plan and to public repositories.[2][9]
Budgets. On Scale, weekly credit budgets exclude user seat charges because these “are fixed organizational costs rather than consumption-based project work”.[8]
Virtualization & partitioning
User counting is independent of the number of machines, containers or runners a person starts, so no virtualization rule applies. A single committer who triggers hundreds of jobs a day is one active user, while a cron schedule or a service account creates its own active user.[1] The documentation does not exempt jobs that run on self-hosted runners from the active-user definition, which refers to compute resources on non-open-source projects without distinguishing hosted from self-hosted compute.[1]
Cloud / BYOL
User charges apply to the hosted cloud plans. CircleCI Server uses a different structure under the Software License Agreement: each licensed User has a unique Sign-on, and the licence allows “the number of Users provided under such license”.[10] That agreement does not use the active-user concept. The comparison is in CircleCI Server licensing.
Programs
- Prevent unregistered user spend. Organization administrators on Performance and Scale can switch on a Usage Controls toggle so that “only allow registered (users with a CircleCI account) users” can trigger work that consumes credits. A blocked pipeline “will fail to start” and the dashboard shows a
block-unregistered-usererror. The setting is not available on the Free plan.[3] CircleCI also advises inviting team members from Organization Settings, People, and then checking the Users tab.[1] - Open source credit allowance. Public open source builds do not make users active.[1]
- Plan sharing and transfer. Child organizations that share a parent plan bill their credits and other usage to the parent organization.[2] The pages retrieved do not say how user seat charges are allocated between parent and child.
Audits and compliance
CircleCI documents no audit procedure for user counts in the pages retrieved. The practical control is the Users list under Plan Usage, supported by the unregistered-user setting. Common reconciliation points for a licence manager include:
- bots and CI service accounts that push commits and are counted as machine users or unregistered users;
- contractors and external contributors who trigger pull request builds on private repositories;
- approvers of manual workflow gates;
- the same person appearing under several identities, which the SaaS Agreement acknowledges can duplicate counts.[1][7]
Out of scope
- Roles and permissions inside an organization, which control access rather than licensing.
- Scale seat prices agreed by Order, which can differ from the 40,000-credit list figure.
- Third-party version control seats, such as GitHub or GitLab licences, which are separate products.