Do outside collaborators count as paid users?
Outside collaborators on public repositories of an organization are free. Only the ones invited to collaborate on private repositories are counted as paid users.
Hope this helps!
I was quite excited about this change (we're an agency with a large number of repos and a relatively small number of users) until I read your comment.
When they introduced the new organization features, I smelled they were heading here, but I honestly thought that the "outside collaborator" concept was meant exactly for not billing this kind of rare users. Guess what, greediness has no limit.