Budget and usage alerts are crucial tools to prevent unexpected high charges on platforms like AWS, where unsupervised usage can result in substantial invoices. Recognizing the importance of maintaining ongoing customer relationships over one-time revenue spikes, Lago offers a system to manage consumption and billing through multi-layered alerts. These alerts can monitor lifetime spend, current-cycle spend, and metric-based spend, allowing for both soft and hard thresholds that either notify users or automatically pause features. This proactive approach ensures that users never exceed their budgets unknowingly, leading to zero-surprise invoices, improved customer satisfaction, and more predictable infrastructure costs, which in turn helps finance teams confidently engage in long-term contracts.