You cannot, natively, on either platform. Vercel fires at 50/75/100% of a spend amount you nominate. Netlify fires at 50/75/100% of your plan allowance. The amounts are configurable; the percentages are not.
Why the fixed steps are a problem#
The distance between 75% and 100% is not a percentage. It is an amount of time, and it varies enormously with what is going wrong.
| Failure mode | 75% → 100% |
|---|---|
| Gradual traffic growth | Days |
| A post that lands well | Hours |
| An AI crawler discovering your image routes | Under an hour |
| A serverless function in a retry loop | Minutes |
For the top row, 75% is a generous warning. For the bottom row, a notification at 75% and a notification at 100% arrive close enough together to be the same event — and you were asleep for both.
The thresholds worth having are the early ones. 50% is too early to be actionable on a normal month and gets ignored, which trains you to ignore the 75% as well. Something like 60–65% is often the sweet spot: high enough to mean something, early enough to act.
Neither platform offers it.
Three ways to get it#
1. Poll the API yourself#
Vercel has had a billing API since February 2026:
vercel usage --from 2026-08-01 --to 2026-08-31 --breakdown daily --format json
Netlify exposes account bandwidth at
/api/v1/accounts/{account_id}/bandwidth.
Wrap either in a cron, compare against whatever number you like, notify however you like. Full working example in the Netlify bandwidth alert guide.
Cost: somewhere to run it, a long-lived token living there, and a channel that is realistically not a page at 3am.
2. A log drain into a monitoring tool#
What Netlify officially recommends. Datadog, Better Stack or similar, with alerting rules on top. Genuinely powerful and the right answer if you already run one of those.
Cost: real setup time, and a monitoring bill on top of your hosting bill.
3. A tool that already does it#
MONII lets you set the threshold to any percentage and pushes your phone when you cross it. Works on Hobby, where Vercel offers nothing at all.
Cost: $9.99/month, $99.99/year or $149 once, after a 7-day trial. The free tier keeps an emergency alert at 100%.
Being straight about the trade#
If you have a machine to run a cron on and half an afternoon, option 1 is genuinely fine and it is free. A lot of people should just do that, and this page tells you how.
The argument for option 3 is not that the polling is hard. It is that a notification which reaches your phone and has a pause button attached is a different thing from a Slack message you read the next morning. Whether that difference is worth the money depends entirely on what a bad month would cost you.
Questions people actually ask
Can I change Vercel's alert thresholds?
No. Vercel fires at 50%, 75% and 100% of the spend amount you nominate. The amount is configurable; the percentages are not.
Can I change Netlify's alert thresholds?
No. Netlify sends usage notifications at 50%, 75% and 100% of your plan allowance, with no way to add your own.
Why does the threshold matter?
Because the gap between 75% and 100% is measured in time, not percent. For a slow monthly drift it is days. For a serverless function in a retry loop it can be minutes.
Pick your own number
MONII alerts at any percentage — 60%, 78%, wherever you still have room to react — and works on Hobby as well as Pro.
Get MONII for iOS ›