# Spending alerts

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.

<Callout type="warning" title="Spending alerts require a paid plan">
  Spending alerts are not available for accounts on the Free plan. Learn more about our [plans](https://www.mux.com/pricing).
</Callout>

## How spending alerts work

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).

### What an alert watches

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.

### Timing and accuracy

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.

<Callout type="warning" title="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.
</Callout>

## Creating your first alert

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.

## I got an alert. Now what?

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.

### Explore each spending category

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](https://dashboard.mux.com/my/video/assets) 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](/docs/pricing/optimizing-video-costs) 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 <ApiRefLink href="/docs/api-reference/video/delivery-usage">Delivery Usage API</ApiRefLink>, which is updated more frequently. Once you're ready to optimize your delivery, our [optimization documentation](/docs/pricing/optimizing-video-costs) can help you out.

**Storage** scales with how much video you've uploaded and each video's resolution. Your [asset list](https://dashboard.mux.com/my/video/assets) 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](/docs/pricing/optimizing-video-costs) 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](https://dashboard.mux.com/my/video/live-streams) 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](https://dashboard.mux.com/my/robots/jobs) 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.

## If you didn't expect to receive this alert

A team member may have added you to the alert. You can unsubscribe from alerts any time under **Organization Settings > Billing > Alerts**.

## Have questions?

Head [here](https://www.mux.com/support) to chat with our support team.