Active contributor

An active contributor is a person who actually triggered CI activity within a recent window — the billing unit a growing set of CI analytics tools charges by, so the bill tracks who really uses the pipelines instead of how many people sit in the organization chart.

How it is counted

Every vendor's definition combines the same three ingredients:

Two published examples show the range (both as of 2026-07-28). Datadog CI Visibility includes a committer if they "make at least three commits in a given month", identified by Git author email. Mergify counts "a contributor is active if they open a PR or push commits to one in the last 30 days" at $21 per seat per month on its Max plan, with inactive teammates costing nothing.

The definitions matter more than the headline price. Things to check in any active-contributor scheme:

• Bot handling — whether Dependabot, Renovate, and service accounts are excluded automatically, on request, or not at all.
• Deduplication — one person committing under two email addresses, or across two providers, may count as two contributors.
• Viewer seats — whether teammates who only read dashboards are free.
• Window edges — a rolling window sheds a departed contributor gradually; a calendar-month minimum drops them at the month boundary.

Why it matters

Per-active-contributor pricing rewards the common reality that CI usage concentrates: an organization of 80 people where 25 push code pays for 25, and a contractor who leaves stops costing money a month later without anyone editing seats. It also makes cost analysis natural — dividing CI spend by the same population gives cost per contributor, a rate you can benchmark across teams and over time.

The failure modes are the mirror image. Weak bot detection quietly bills automation as people, duplicate identities double-count real ones, and a burst of drive-by contributors — an open-source sprint, a mass dependency-bump week — can spike a bill that normally sits flat. Comparing vendors therefore means comparing definitions line by line, as the Datadog and Mergify pages do.

TrimCI bills by the same industry pattern — humans who triggered pipeline runs in a rolling window, with bot exclusions and free dashboard-only seats. The exact definition, the exclusion controls, and current per-contributor prices are answered canonically on the pricing page.