A warning message that tells me little & gives no help to solve the problem: "You appear to have a billing problem"

[GH-LinCoder]

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I was delighted to discover codespaces & I wondered how and why it was a free service.

After 5 days my delight was paused by a cryptic message: "You seem to have a billing issue. Please adjust your billing settings to continue using codespaces." I was puzzled how there could be a billing issue on a free service.

The warning gave no clue and no link to find out. Therefore I had to start searching. Having read three pages about the free system and nothing that helped at all, I clicked a few links and found myself on a page which showed me that I had used 60 hours of 'compute' in those 5 days.

This had a notional price of $10 but I owed nothing because 60 hours is only half of the 120 hours that is supposed to be free per month. No explanation anywhere of why I have a 'billing issue' when I don't owe anything. No apparent explanation of what I was supposed to do about it.

I have taken the opportunity to work on the database side of the project and to review designs. It is now two days later, no email telling me what the problem is, nothing on the website. I am not inclined to spend hours trying to find out why they aren't keeping to their offer of 120 hours. I will probably clone the repository and work on it with my own server, but I did like codespaces while it worked.

I do wonder why they didn't explain the problem in the warning message or include a link to an explanation.

If they ever let me know what the problem actually is, perhaps it could be solved, but I assume they aren't going to tell me, and I will probably never know.

It was fun while it lasted.

[ItzLevvie]

why they aren't keeping to their offer of 120 hours

They have given you 120 hours but you need to know that usage hours (up to 60 hours) and core/compute hours (120 hours) are very different. This is already stated in GitHub's documentation over at https://docs.github.com/en/billing/concepts/product-billing/github-codespaces

If you chose a higher machine configuration or kept using the codespace continously for more than 4 hours per day or have multiple codespaces running then you will deplete your hours very quickly.

See the table below:

Machine Type	GitHub Free (120 core hours per month)	GitHub Pro (180 core hours per month)
basicLinux32gb	60 usage hours	90 usage hours
standardLinux32gb	30 usage hours	45 usage hours
premiumLinux	15 usage hours	22.5 usage hours
largePremiumLinux	7.5 usage hours	11.25 usage hours
xLargePremiumLinux	3.75 usage hours	5.625 usage hours