Budgets

Budgets set limits to measure your AI spend against, and alert you as it nears and passes them. They never stop or cap spending at the provider. Every paid plan gets a whole-account budget. Business and Scale add team budgets, which split spend by team or product.

The whole-account budget

Pro, Business and Scale

One budget that covers all your tracked AI spend, on every platform and key. It has two optional limits:

• A monthly limit, with alerts at 80% and 100% (see Alerts below).
• A daily limit, with an alert the day spend passes it.

Set them on the Budgets page with Edit limits. Leave a field empty for no limit. The whole-account budget can't be renamed or deleted; clearing both limits turns it off.

Its alerts follow the Budget alerts signal in your monitoring pack. If the pack you're on doesn't include Budget alerts, you can switch the signal on under Monitoring packs & signals. The Budgets page tells you when the signal is off.

Team budgets

Business and Scale

A team budget covers any mix of:

• Whole platform connections: everything spent through, say, your OpenAI connection.
• Individual API keys: one key on a connection, such as a "search-prod" key your search team uses.

A connection or key belongs to at most one team budget. If a key is in one budget and its whole connection is in another, the key's spend counts toward the key's budget, since that's the more specific choice. Anything you add to a budget moves out of whichever budget had it before, and the picker tells you when that will happen.

The picker lists API keys that have had spend in the last 90 days. Spend that isn't in any team budget is shown under the list, so every dollar this month is accounted for. Spend in a team budget still counts toward the whole-account budget.

Each team budget can have a monthly limit in US dollars, or none if you only want to see the spend.

Alerts

Budgets count the same spend your plan does (the provider-reported costs in your dashboard) for the current calendar month, and start again from zero on the 1st.

When a budget with a monthly limit reaches 80%, and again at 100%, TokenFront sends one alert, once each per month. If spend jumps straight past 100%, you get only the over-limit alert.

Before either of those, if a budget is still under 80% but on pace to pass its limit before the month ends, you get one forecast alert naming the day it would get there. The projection is this month's spend so far plus, for each remaining day, the budget's usual spend on that day of the week over the last four weeks. The Budgets page shows the same projection. It needs at least two weeks of history, so a brand-new budget won't show one yet. Changing the limit lets the alerts go out again against the new amount. Alerts are just alerts: nothing is ever paused or blocked. They're based on spend your providers have reported so far, which can trail actual usage by hours (see How current the data is), so spend may already be past a threshold by the time its alert arrives.

Who gets them:

• The account Owner, who sets the limits.
• Members who have anomaly alerts turned on.

Anyone can turn budget alerts off for themselves under Account → Notifications, or with the unsubscribe link in the email. If you've connected Slack or Microsoft Teams, budget alerts go there too.

Who can change budgets

Only the Owner can set limits or create, rename, delete or change team budgets. Members can see the Budgets page.

Budgets in Reports

On Business and Scale, the Reports table has a Budget column, and the CSV export has a budget column, both showing the team budget each record counts toward.

If you change plans

• Business to Pro: your team budgets are kept, but they, their alerts and the Reports column switch off. They come back as they were if you move up again. The whole-account budget carries on.
• To Free: the whole-account budget's limits are kept, but its alerts stop until you're on a paid plan again.