Launch Week IV Day 1: Alerts and Budget Limits

Budget & Usage Alerts

We’ve all heard the horror stories of unsupervised AWS instances that lead to million-dollar invoices. Even when we’re not talking about millions, you probably know the feeling of usage-based bills far more expensive than you thought. These scenarios are bad for everyone, including the vendor: 

Nobody wants their customers to have sticker shock. An ongoing customer relationship is worth more than one-time revenue.

Lago now helps you prevent those scenarios. With budget & usage alerts,  you can put hard edges around consumption and billing. 

The feature is basically a multi-layered warning system. You can track:

• Lifetime spend for the entire subscription—ideal for free trials that should never exceed, say, a total of $100.
• Current-cycle spend so finance knows when a customer hits 80 percent of this month’s credits and engineering can act before overages accrue.‍
• Metric-based spend in dollars for example or usage metrics, meaning you can send an alert when a user has used up 1 million API calls or $100 of API calls.

For each, you decide whether a threshold is soft (email/webhook/notification, customer keeps using) or hard (feature pauses automatically). You can surface these a few different ways: 

• Build cost control features so users never exceed their budgets or get notified about their usage.
• Build internal alerts to help customer-facing or eng teams understand usage and guide conversations with customers or prospects.

Why teams love it

• Zero-surprise invoices mean higher NPS, fewer chargebacks. mean finance can sign multi-year deals with confidence.
• Predictable infrastructure costs mean finance can sign multi-year deals with confidence.