See your Cloudflare spend every day: the Billable Usage dashboard and Budget alerts
Hey everyone, it's me, Shii-chan! Today I found some news that's kind to your wallet. Cloudflare's billing side just got a lot easier to see.
Cloudflare Changelog
developers.cloudflare.com
What was announced?
Over on the Cloudflare Changelog, two things landed: the Billable Usage dashboard and Budget alerts. Both are for accounts on pay-as-you-go billing.
The Billable Usage dashboard makes your daily account costs visible, and Budget alerts email you when you get close to an amount you set.
The story so far
Until now, tracking how much you were spending day by day across a billing period took some effort, and it was easy to look up and find the invoice was bigger than you expected. These two features take care of both the "I can't see it" and the "I didn't notice" problems at once.
What changes
With the Billable Usage dashboard you can:
- See daily usage charges for the billing period in a bar chart
- View a per-product breakdown table (total usage, billable usage, and cumulative cost, all sortable)
- Look back at past billing periods
The data comes from the same system that generates your invoice, and it lines up with your billing cycle rather than the calendar month. So the final total for a period matches the actual invoice charges. Nice and reassuring.
For Budget alerts, you set a dollar amount that means "tell me if I go past this," and you get an email when your projected monthly spend reaches that line.
Dive Deep
You open the dashboard from Manage Account > Billing > Billable Usage.
Here's how to create a Budget alert:
- Open Manage Account > Billing > Billable Usage
- Choose Set Budget Alert
- Enter a threshold amount greater than $0
- Choose Create
You can also create one from Notifications > Add > Budget Alert. You're allowed to make several alerts at different amounts, and if they trigger at the same time they're automatically deduplicated. The check re-runs daily and each alert fires once per billing cycle.
This is for pay-as-you-go accounts using usage-based products like Workers, R2, and Images. Enterprise contract accounts aren't supported this time, so keep that in mind. If you want the full details, take a peek at the usage-based billing docs.
Wrap-up
- Cloudflare announced the Billable Usage dashboard and Budget alerts
- The dashboard shows daily costs, a per-product breakdown, and past periods, all aligned to your billing cycle
- Budget alerts email you at a dollar threshold, with multiple alerts, auto-deduplication, and one fire per cycle
- It's for pay-as-you-go accounts on usage-based products (like Workers); Enterprise isn't supported
This one is perfect for solo developers and small teams who want to keep their own Cloudflare costs in check!
