---
title: Budgets
description: Set a monthly budget per agent or for everything, and get warned early when the pace looks wrong.
section: spend
order: 2
---

# Budgets

Most tools show you what you spent. AgentPing tells you where you are
heading, while you can still do something about it.

## Set a budget

Set a monthly budget on a single agent, or one for everything. You will
be told as your spend crosses **50%, 80%, and 100%** of it.

The 100% mark is an alert, never a brake. AgentPing observes your
agents; it will never be the reason one stops. If you blow past budget,
your agents keep running and you keep getting the data; we just make
sure you know.

## The pace warning

A monthly total tells you the bad news on the last day of the month. A
forecast tells you on the eighth.

We project where your month is heading from your **recent rate**:

> trailing 7-day daily spend, times the days left in the month, plus
> what you have spent so far.

We use the trailing rate rather than stretching the whole month in a
straight line, so a mid-month model swap or a traffic spike shows up
within a week instead of being averaged away. There is no machine
learning and no seasonality here; it is one sentence of arithmetic, on
purpose, so the number is always explainable.

On an agent you will see it in plain language, for example:

> On pace: ~$74 of $60 budget

When the projection stays above 110% of budget for two daily checks in a
row, a **forecast alert** fires. The two-check debounce means a single
spiky day does not page anyone; a real trend does.

## Where it shows up

- On each agent, next to its spend, with over-pace styling when the
  forecast exceeds the budget.
- On the account dashboard, as a budget card.
- As a [Spend alert](/docs/spend/alerts) to your chosen channel when the
  forecast breaches.

AgentPing never stops your agents. It tells you first.