The moment it happens

Get a Slack message when Vercel spend nears budget

When your bill reaches 50%, 75% or 100% of your budget, the team sees the current spend straight away.

Runs: The moment it happens
Apps: Vercel
AI: Not needed
Access: none for receiving; Owner or Billing role to configure

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: give me a link to add as the budget webhook in Vercel. When it fires, post to #finance in Slack the current spend, the budget amount and which threshold we just reached.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

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First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

Vercel usage billing can surprise people. A traffic spike from a launch, an image optimization loop, or a function stuck in retries can burn through a month's budget in days, and the first sign is often the invoice. Finance asks why the bill is double the forecast, and the engineer who changed the caching headers three weeks ago has to reconstruct what happened.

Vercel can send a webhook when spend crosses a threshold you set on your budget. When that event arrives, the automation reads currentSpend, budgetAmount and thresholdPercent from the payload and posts a Slack message such as 'Spend is at 75% of the budget', with the dollar figures included. You get one message each at 50%, 75% and 100%.

It is useful for startups with a card on file and no spending cap, and for agencies who bill client projects to a shared team.

What you get out of it

Time to react before the cap
A message at 50% leaves half the month's budget for you to investigate. Catching a runaway function at that point costs a fraction of what discovering it at invoice time does, and you still have room to fix it.
Spend questions get an answer on the day
The Slack message carries the current spend and budget amounts, so whoever sees it knows immediately whether this is a small drift or a serious overrun and who on the team should look into it.
Three thresholds, three levels of urgency
The 50% message is informational, 75% is a prompt to check usage, and 100% is a call to act. The team learns to read the escalation instead of treating each ping the same way.
Finance hears it from engineering first
Posting into a shared channel means the budget owner sees the same message as developers. Nobody has to relay bad news after the fact, and the conversation about limits and approvals starts earlier.
Pairs with the cause while it is fresh
Overspend usually follows a recent deploy or a traffic event. An alert the same day makes it easy to connect the spike to a change that is still in everyone's memory and can still be rolled back.

How it works

What happens, step by step

When your Vercel bill reaches 50%, 75% or 100% of your budget, Vercel tells ClickRuntime straight away.
ClickRuntime reads the current spend, the budget and the threshold reached.
It posts them to your Slack channel.

Before it runs live

Connect Vercel
Paste your automation's link into the other app's webhook settings

What you get

RunsThe moment it happens

Get a Slack message when Vercel spend nears budgetjust nowSucceeded

Slack · #financeVercel spend reached 75% of budget: $187.50 of $250.00

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.

Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

Act only on the items that match your own rules, and skip the rest
Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
Combine it with other Vercel steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.

get_alerted_when_spend_hits_a_budget.pyexample

import hashlib
import hmac
from clickruntime import on_event, credentials, notify

@on_event
def handle(event):
    secret = credentials.secret("VERCEL_WEBHOOK_SECRET").encode()
    expected = hmac.new(secret, event.body.encode(), hashlib.sha1).hexdigest()
    if not hmac.compare_digest(expected, event.header("x-vercel-signature") or ""):
        return {"ok": False}
    p = event.json.get("payload", event.json)
    notify.slack(f"Vercel spend reached {p['thresholdPercent']}% of budget: "
                 f"${p['currentSpend']:,.2f} of ${p['budgetAmount']:,.2f}", channel="#finance")
    return {"threshold": p["thresholdPercent"]}

FAQ

Common questions

Where do I set the budget thresholds in Vercel?

The budget and its alert thresholds are configured in your Vercel team's billing and spend management settings. You choose the monthly amount and the percentages, and Vercel sends the event when each one is crossed. A team owner or billing role is typically needed.

Will I get the alert twice if spend hovers around 75%?

Vercel sends the webhook when the threshold is crossed, not on every usage tick, so hovering around a percentage should not produce repeats. Each threshold fires once per billing period, which keeps the channel quiet.

What does the Slack message actually say?

It states the percentage reached, the current spend, and the budget amount, all taken straight from the webhook payload. It does not guess at causes, so you still open Vercel's usage view to see which project or function drove the cost.

What permissions does it need?

none for receiving; Owner or Billing role to configure. Nothing else in your accounts is used.

Does it need AI?

No. It runs without AI, so it doesn't use your plan's AI allowance.

How many runs does it use?

One run for each event the app sends.

Can I change how it works?

Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

Every 5 minutes