I first noticed something strange when I received an invoice from GitHub. My public open-source repository was listed as being billed under “metered” usage.
If you know GitHub’s pricing, you’ll know they have “metered” services — pay-as-you-go features like extra storage or GitHub Actions minutes. Public repositories shouldn’t normally incur these charges, so something was clearly wrong.
I opened a support ticket on July 27, 2025. Then I waited.
On August 12, I finally got a message asking if the problem was still happening. I confirmed it was. The next day, the explanation arrived: a billing bug had caused some users to be charged a couple of cents for metered billing. They’d reversed the charge and were working on a fix.
I do appreciate that, once the issue landed on the right desk, they resolved it quickly. But I can’t ignore the question: how many hundreds of thousands of these micro-transactions went unnoticed before someone spoke up? How many people saw a few cents on their bill and decided it wasn’t worth chasing down with support?
It turns out I wasn’t alone. On Reddit, user pandadev shared a similar experience: they noticed a usage row showing “< $0.01” for Actions storage — space that should have been free. They opened a ticket, and GitHub confirmed the bug, refunded the amount, and said they were fixing it.
This collective thread made one thing clear: it wasn’t just me. Tiny bugs were slipping through, accumulating multitudes of unresolved micro-charges across users. As these cents quietly pile up at scale, they challenge the trust we place in billing systems — especially those that claim to be accurate to the last decimal.
