Set Up Budget Alerts

import { Steps } from ‘@astrojs/starlight/components’;

Set Up Budget Alerts

Budget alerts notify you when your cloud spend hits a threshold — before you see it on the bill. You can set them up from the dashboard, via API, or by asking Claude.

From the dashboard

1. Go to Budgets in the left sidebar and click New Budget.

2. Pick the scope:

   • All accounts — total spend across AWS + Azure + GCP
   • Single account — one specific cloud account
   • Service — e.g., just EC2, just S3

3. Set the monthly limit and choose when to alert:

   • 80% of budget (default)
   • 100% of budget (default)
   • Custom threshold

4. Choose where alerts go:

   • Email (your account email by default, or add more)
   • Slack channel (if you have the Slack integration configured)

5. Click Create Budget.

Via Claude (MCP)

If you have the MCP server connected, you can skip the dashboard entirely:

“Create a $5,000 monthly budget for my AWS account and alert me at 80% and 100%”

“Set a $500/month budget for our GCP dev environment”

“Show me all my current budgets”

Via API

curl -X POST https://api.xplorr.io/api/v1/budgets \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer xplorr_your_token" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Production AWS",
    "amount": 5000,
    "period": "monthly",
    "account_id": "aws-account-id",
    "alert_thresholds": [80, 100]
  }'

Anomaly alerts vs budget alerts

	Budget alert	Anomaly alert
Trigger	Spend crosses a fixed threshold	Spend spikes vs rolling average
Good for	Monthly spend limits	Unexpected cost surges mid-month
Setup	You define the amount	Automatic, no config needed

Both types send to the same notification channels. Set up both for full coverage.

Tips

• Set your budget at 90% of what you actually want to spend — gives you headroom to react before you hit the limit.
• If you have multiple cloud accounts, start with one account-level budget per provider, then add service-level budgets for your biggest spenders (usually compute and storage).
• Budget alerts reset at the start of each calendar month.