Spend Management in beta for pay-as-you-go, pausing Workers and Durable Objects at limits

Spend controls have been at the top of the list of most requested features from developers building on our developer platform for quite some time now. With more than 10 million developers now building on Cloudflare, this matters more than ever.

Although we’ve had usage notifications and budget alerts available to paid plans for a while, this doesn’t solve the problem completely; informing is not the same as controlling.

You can now set spending thresholds and choose to have Cloudflare pause activity when those limits are reached, thus avoiding unexpected bills from unplanned usage. Today, we're introducing Spend Management in Beta, for any pay-as-you-go (PayGo) customer, starting with Workers and Durable Objects.

Use Spend Management alongside AI Gateway spend limits to manage compute and AI inference costs across your application. AI Gateway already supports per-user and per-model budgets for Workers AI and other AI providers, applied to requests routed through your gateway.

You can start using Spend Management using the dashboard, cf CLI, or REST API.

In the dashboard, head over to Manage Account > Billing > Spend limits and enable the products for which you want to control spending.

When you enable controls on a product, you can define a spending limit, specify a recipient email for notifications, and set one or more alert thresholds.

If you configure a recipient email, Cloudflare will send notifications when the evaluated spend reaches one of the thresholds or your spending limit. When the limit is reached, a blocking policy is enforced and your product is paused automatically.

If you go to the dashboard, you can see the current billing cycle costs for each supported product in near real time (under 10 minutes), and manage your settings and thresholds from there. The overview panel tells you which products have thresholds and limits configured. In this example, you can see that Workers triggered two alerts before hitting the hard limit.

Note that the billing cycle starts when the paid subscription begins, not when you deploy a Worker or create a spending cap; a subscription starting October 10 generally has a cycle of October 10-November 10 — not a calendar month.

The dashboard also shows an audit log, so you can see who changed a limit and when, or when a cap was reached.

As with most Cloudflare services, Spend Management is also an API that you can use programmatically; the documentation can be found in our Developer Documentation. Here’s an example, but using the API:

"https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/${CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID}/billing/spend-policies" \

--header "Authorization: Bearer ${CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN}" \

--header "Content-Type: application/json" \

}'And, of course, you can use cf, the CLI for the entire Cloudflare API:

cf billing spend-policies create --body '{