CapBrake

Billing alert relay

The relay is free in early access. AWS, Google Cloud, Firebase and Cloudflare cannot put one hard cap on most bills. They send budget alert emails instead. A CapBrake relay gives you a private address to put on those alerts. We turn each alert into a short summary and send it to your browser or your Slack.

We never ask for your cloud credentials. You add the relay address in your provider's own settings.

Sign in to create a relay.

What we keep

For each alert we store the provider, a summary such as the amount, threshold, budget and account, and the time. The summary is deleted after 30 days. We never store the email body. Delete a relay and mail to its address bounces.

Set up AWS

  1. Create a relay above and copy its address.
  2. Open AWS Budgets, edit a budget's alerts, and add the relay address as an email recipient.
  3. AWS sends a verification email to the relay address. CapBrake sends you its link as a browser alert or Slack message, so turn one of those on first.
  4. Open the link while signed in to the AWS account that added the address. AWS requires this before it sends alerts there.

Details in the AWS checklist.

Set up Google Cloud

  1. Spend cap budgets cannot send alerts to a custom address, so create a separate alerts-only budget. Go to Budgets & alerts, click Create new budget and keep Alerts only.
  2. Set the scope, amount and threshold rules.
  3. Under email notifications, select Link Monitoring email notification channels to this budget, then add a Cloud Monitoring email channel with your relay address.
  4. Save. Google says the first alert can take several hours.

Details in the Google Cloud checklist.

Set up Firebase

  1. Firebase spend caps alert only billing admins and project owners, so create a separate alerts-only budget for the Firebase project in Google Cloud Budgets & alerts.
  2. Scope it to your Firebase project and set the amount and thresholds.
  3. Select Link Monitoring email notification channels to this budget and add a Cloud Monitoring email channel with your relay address.

Details in the Firebase checklist.

Set up Cloudflare

  1. In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to Manage Account > Billing > Billable Usage.
  2. Select Create budget alert, set the threshold, and add your relay address as an email recipient.
  3. Budget alerts are for Pay-as-you-go accounts only.

Details in the Cloudflare checklist.