Set Budget Alerts and Hard Spending Caps in Tokonomics

Set monthly budget thresholds so Tokonomics alerts you at 50%, 80%, and 100% of spend — or enforces hard caps on Pro to block overage.

Tokonomics gives you control over how much you spend on AI every month. You set a budget, choose where you want to be notified, and Tokonomics handles the rest — firing alerts as you approach your limit and, on Pro, refusing requests the moment you exceed it. Budget controls apply to your entire account’s LLM spend routed through the proxy.

Budget thresholds

Set your monthly budget in the Tokonomics dashboard under Settings → Budget. Once a budget is configured, Tokonomics tracks cumulative spend across all proxied requests for the current calendar month and fires an alert each time you cross a configurable threshold.

The default thresholds are 50%, 80%, and 100% of your monthly budget. You can adjust these percentages to match your team’s escalation policy — for example, adding a 90% threshold if you want an extra warning before hitting the cap.

Budget thresholds reset at the start of each calendar month. Mid-month budget changes take effect immediately against the spend already accumulated in the current month.

Alert channels

When a threshold is crossed, Tokonomics can notify you through any of the following channels. Configure them in Settings → Alerts.

Slack

Post a message to any Slack channel using an incoming webhook URL.

Microsoft Teams

Deliver an alert card to a Teams channel via a Teams webhook connector.

Email

Send an email to one or more addresses on your account.

Webhook

POST a JSON payload to any URL — compatible with n8n, Zapier, Make, Flowise, and LangFlow for automated workflows.

The webhook payload includes the threshold crossed, current spend, budget amount, and a timestamp, giving downstream automations enough context to act without a follow-up API call.

Hard spending caps (Pro)

Pro plan accounts can go beyond alerts and enforce a hard cap that blocks further LLM requests once your monthly budget is exhausted.

When the hard cap is enabled and your spend reaches 100% of the configured budget, Tokonomics returns the following error for every subsequent proxied request until the month rolls over:

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Retry-After: <seconds until month reset>
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "error": "Budget cap reached",
  "message": "Monthly spending cap exceeded"
}

Your application should handle 429 responses from the Tokonomics proxy and surface a meaningful message to users rather than retrying immediately. The Retry-After header tells you exactly how many seconds remain until the monthly budget resets.

Enabling a hard cap means your application will stop receiving LLM responses once the cap is hit — even for latency-sensitive or user-facing features. Test your error-handling logic in a staging environment before enabling hard caps in production.

Free vs Pro

Free plan — Budget alerts via all supported channels. Hard spending caps are not available; requests continue after the budget threshold is crossed.

Pro plan — Budget alerts plus optional hard spending caps that enforce a strict monthly ceiling.

See the full comparison on the Plans page.

To walk through setting up your first budget alert end-to-end, see the Budget Alerts guide.