Alerts allow you to receive emails when your spending crosses a threshold. Use this guide to configure alerts and investigate the spend behind one.
Usage-based billing means your costs grow with your traffic, and sometimes that growth catches you by surprise. Spending alerts email your team when your usage-based spend passes a dollar amount you choose. That way, you can investigate before the invoice arrives. Alerts don't cap or pause anything, and your service keeps running when one fires.
Spending alerts require a paid plan
Spending alerts are not available for accounts on the Free plan. Learn more about our plans.
An alert is a dollar amount that you set on your usage-based spend, and a group of email addresses to be notified. When your spend in a billing period passes that amount, Mux notifies those email addresses. You can set up to three alerts on your organization, each at its own amount, using whole dollars (for example, $100).
An alert tracks your total spend as a single number across everything you're billed for by usage: encoding, delivery, live streaming, storage, Mux Robots, Mux Data, and so on.
Mux checks your spend against your thresholds about once an hour, so you'll usually get the email within an hour of crossing a threshold. Alerts should be treated as a safety net, rather than a live meter or an emergency brake.
Email delivery is best-effort
An alert can be delayed, land in spam, or occasionally not arrive at all, so don't rely on alerts as your only way of tracking spend. Check your usage regularly under Organization Settings > Usage Reports. You can also add account-alerts@notifications.mux.com to your safe-senders list to improve the chance it will be received properly.
Alerts are created in the Mux dashboard. Navigate to Organization Settings > Billing > Alerts. You can create up to three alerts. Each alert takes an alert threshold in dollars and a list of team members to notify.
You received an alert and have crossed your spend threshold. Whether that's expected or not, here's how to see what's driving it.
Mux has a variety of features with their own usage and costs. Here's how to dig in deeper into each of those costs.
Encoding scales with how many videos you upload, the duration of those videos, and the video quality. Look at your asset dashboard to understand how many videos you're uploading and their duration. You can track your uploads by quality in the dashboard under Organization Settings > Usage Reports. Once you're ready to make changes to your upload pipeline, our optimization documentation can guide you to reducing your costs.
Delivery scales with how much video people watch and at what resolution. You can monitor daily usage in the dashboard under Organization Settings > Usage Reports, or with our Delivery Usage APIAPI, which is updated more frequently. Once you're ready to optimize your delivery, our optimization documentation can help you out.
Storage scales with how much video you've uploaded and each video's resolution. Your asset list in the dashboard is the quickest way to monitor recent uploads. You can also monitor daily usage in the dashboard under Organization Settings > Usage Reports. Just like encoding and delivery, our optimization documentation has tips on reducing your storage costs.
Live streaming bills for the entire time a stream is live, whether or not anyone is watching. A stream left running over a weekend or after an event ended can silently grow your bill. Look in the live stream dashboard and disable any that shouldn't be "active".
Mux Robots scales with how many robots jobs run and which workflows they use. Check the jobs list in your dashboard to see what's run recently and on which assets. Directives start jobs automatically on every asset they're attached to, so a batch of uploads can trigger a lot of jobs.
A team member may have added you to the alert. You can unsubscribe from alerts any time under Organization Settings > Billing > Alerts.
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