Budgets and Spend Alerts

Budgets

Part of: Cost & Token Budgeting

A startup wired GPT into a free trial and went to bed. One user wrote a script that hammered the endpoint all night. By morning the bill was $11,000 - for a product that earned $0. There was no spending cap, no per-user limit, no alert. Every cost lever in this module shrinks the average call; budgets and alerts protect you from the runaway call. They are the seatbelt. What it is Three controls turn estimates into guardrails: 1. Spend caps. A hard ceiling on total spend (per day or per month). Cross it and further calls are refused. This bounds your worst case to a number you chose, not a number an attacker chose. 2. Per-user budgets. A separate cap for each user, so one person cannot drain the whole account. Track each user's running spend and reject calls that would push them over their own limit. 3. Spend alerts. A warning fired before you hit the cap - say at 80% of budget - so a human can react while there is still room, instead of discovering the problem from the invoice. How it works Each cap is a running total compared against a limit. Per user, you accumulate cost and refuse the call that would breach the budget; you fire one alert when crossing the warning threshold: The

Challenge: The Budget Guard