Alerts
Budgets and alerts
Account and per-service budgets, threshold and forecast alerts, and how often spend is checked.
A budget is a monthly amount in dollars, scoped to an account or a single service on that account, or to every connected account at once.
Alert types
| Alert | When it fires | Severity |
|---|---|---|
| Threshold | Estimated month-to-date spend crosses 50%, 80% or 100% of the budget. Each fires once per month. | Info at 50%, warning at 80%, critical at 100% |
| Forecast | The month-end projection crosses 100%, while you are still under it. Once per month. | Info |
| Spike | Spend in the latest window is far above its recent baseline. | Warning |
| Cap ran | A hard cap executed, ran as a dry run, or failed. | Critical when it fired, failed, or ran dry because your plan lacks hard caps; warning for a dry run you chose or a restore |
| Token problem | Cloudflare rejected a token, or polling keeps failing. | Warning |
Alerts are deduplicated: one threshold, one message, however many polls see it.
Severity
Severity decides which channels hear about an alert. Each channel has a minimum severity, so you can send only critical alerts to a pager and everything to a team channel. See alert channels for setup and for sending a test critical alert.
How often we check
| Plan | Interval |
|---|---|
| Pro | every 5 minutes |
Cloudflare’s analytics arrive with a short delay, so a reading reflects the last few minutes rather than this second.
Months and money
Budgets reset on the first of the month, UTC. Spend is estimated from usage and Cloudflare’s published prices, including each product’s free allowance. The $5 Workers Paid subscription fee is not part of usage spend.
Budget levels
Every budget also has a level, ok, warn, critical or exceeded, that your own code can read through the budget status API to shed cost gracefully before a cap is needed.