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Budgets & alerts

Set per-team and per-project AI budgets, get alerted before they breach, and forecast next-quarter spend — with alerts delivered to the channels your team already lives in. Budget governance is advisory by default: it informs and warns without ever blocking your AI traffic, and enforcement is something you turn on deliberately, where you want it.

What you get

  • Per-team and per-project budgets over attributed, reconciled spend.
  • Threshold alerts at 75% / 100% / 150% of plan.
  • Predictive forecasting so you see breaches before they happen.
  • Alert delivery to in-app, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and signed webhooks — with digests to prevent alert storms.

Setting a budget

A budget is a spend limit for a scope you choose — a team, a project, a cost center, or the whole organization — over a time period. Budgets are configured in the Governance surface by users with the FinOps or Admin role, and they measure against reconciled, attributed spend, so the figure a budget tracks is the same figure that appears on your dashboard and in your chargeback export.

Larger budget changes are subject to approval thresholds: raising a budget above a configured value escalates from a single approver to dual approval, and the change is recorded in the audit log.

Threshold alerts

Each budget raises alerts as consumption climbs toward and past its limit:

Threshold Meaning
75% Approaching plan — early warning to investigate.
100% At plan — the budget is fully consumed.
150% Materially over plan — an overrun that warrants action.

Threshold events appear live in the Governance view and feed both real-time alerts and periodic digests. A budget-threshold digest lists each breach with a deep link to triage, and the rows in the digest always match the live Governance view.

Advisory by default, enforcement by choice

Budgets never block your AI traffic by default

Budget governance is advisory out of the box: it alerts and reports, but does not stop anything. Where you want a true guardrail, you can opt a specific budget into a hard stop — an explicit, deliberate setting. Even then, the decision-time interceptor on your AI traffic remains fail-open at the platform level: enforcement is a policy decision you apply to spend, never a control that can break a production request through Venturi's hot path.

This keeps the FinOps guardrail useful without ever making Venturi a single point of failure in front of your AI.

Forecasting

Venturi forecasts spend so a breach is something you anticipate, not discover. Using attributed trends, the Forecasting surface projects where each budget is heading and flags the budgets expected to breach before period end. The target is forecast accuracy within 10% of actuals, so finance can plan against it.

This turns the governance question from "did we overspend?" into "which budgets will breach, and what do we do now?"

Where alerts go

Route alerts to the channels your team already uses. Each user and role chooses their own delivery preferences.

Alerts appear in the in-app notification center and, per preference, by email. Email supports per-event or digest delivery and locale-aware formatting.

Route alerts to specific Slack or Teams channels. Teams is supported at parity with Slack. High-severity alerts support inline acknowledge and assign — acknowledging in Teams or Slack marks the in-app item acknowledged and records who did it.

Register an outbound HTTPS endpoint to receive alerts as signed payloads, with retry and replay on delivery failure, so you can drive your own automation.

{
  "type": "budget.threshold.crossed",
  "budget": "platform-eng-q2",
  "scope": "team:platform-eng",
  "threshold": "100%",
  "period": "2026-Q2",
  "attributed_spend": 124800.00,
  "budget_limit": 120000.00,
  "occurred_at": "2026-05-28T14:02:11Z"
}

No alert storms

Alerting is built to stay signal, not noise:

  • Digests & batching. Choose real-time, hourly, daily, or weekly digests per notification type. A daily budget digest delivers one batched message per day.
  • Coalescing. A connector flapping between healthy and degraded yields a single coalesced entry, not one alert per flap.
  • Scoped mentions. @user and @role mentions notify only people who can already see the object, so an alert never leaks data to someone without access.

Budgets, anomalies, and budget-threshold events can also be rolled into scheduled reports for a regular FinOps digest — see Reporting & exports.