Soft limit
Last verified
A soft limit, or spend alert, sends a notification when spend crosses a threshold. Traffic continues.
Its main weakness is what it compares against: most provider alerts fire on cumulative spend against a monthly budget, which says nothing about whether _today_ was abnormal. A day costing 20× normal may not trigger anything for a week.
For anomaly detection you want a threshold compared against a normal _day_ — getting alerted when AI spend spikes.