Set your first budget

Budgets in CloudTally are simple by design: an amount, a period, a list of email recipients, and a threshold that triggers the alert. You'll have the first one set up in two or three minutes. The dashboard's Budget risk card updates immediately afterwards.

Before you start, make sure at least one Hetzner project is connected and synced. If you haven't done that yet, follow Connect your Hetzner project first.

Decide what to budget

Two common patterns:

• 80% of last month's spend. Use this as a default if you don't have a target. You'll get an early warning before spend creeps past the previous month.
• A hard ceiling. Pick a number you don't want to exceed (e.g. a board-approved cap). Set the alert at 90% so you have time to react.

Both work. You can change the amount any time without resetting history.

Create the budget

1. Open the Budgets page.
2. Click New budget.
3. Fill in:
   • Name — production monthly or similar. Visible in alerts.
   • Amount — in your billing currency. CloudTally uses the same currency Hetzner bills you in.
   • Period — start with Monthly. Annual budgets are useful when you commit to a yearly number; monthly is right for most teams.
   • Scope — all resources by default. You can later scope to a specific resource type (e.g. only servers), but keep it broad for the first budget.
   • Alert threshold — a percentage of the amount. Use 80 for early warning, 100 if you only want to hear about overruns.
   • Notify — comma-separated emails. These can be different from your CloudTally team members — useful for sending alerts to a finops@ distribution list.
4. Click Save.

The budget is active immediately. CloudTally evaluates it once an hour against the latest sync, so the Budget risk card on your dashboard reflects your new budget within minutes.

Read the dashboard's Budget risk card

The card shows the active budget's status as a coloured label:

• On track — projected month-end is below the budget amount.
• Watch — projected month-end is within 10% of the budget. You'll likely cross it but there's slack.
• At risk — projected month-end exceeds the budget. Time to investigate.
• Over budget — actual spend already exceeded the amount.

Status uses both actual and projected spend, so an early-month spike that pushes the projection up will surface as At risk long before you've physically crossed the line.

When the alert fires

When current spend crosses your threshold, CloudTally sends an email to every recipient on the budget. The email includes the budget name, the threshold that was crossed, the current spend, and a deep link back to the budget's detail page.

One alert per threshold per period. If you set the threshold at 80% and spend keeps climbing, you won't get a second email at 90% unless you also configured a second threshold. (Multi-threshold alert rules are a Pro feature — see the Set alert thresholds how-to.)

Iterate from here

The first budget is rarely the right one. After a week or two:

• If you're hitting the threshold but the dashboard says On track, your forecast model has more recent data than your budget assumed — consider raising the amount.
• If you never hear from the budget, lower the threshold or split the budget by resource type so noisy categories don't hide quiet ones.
• If you have multiple projects, create one budget per project so alerts say what's wrong, not just that something is wrong.

What to do next

• Connect more projects if you haven't already. Each connection feeds the same budget unless you scope it.
• Walk through the rest of the trial. Your first week on the trial lines up the next six days, from cost explorer to recommendations to the day-21 decision.