Overview
The Budget feature lets you define monthly spending limits on your AWS accounts and track your consumption against them in real time. With clear status indicators, automatic forecasts, and proactive alerts, you can spot overspending before it becomes a problem and stay in control of your cloud bill.
Budget Overview
The Budget Overview is your high-level entry point. It consolidates information across all of your AWS accounts so you can quickly assess where you stand for the current month.
Total actual spent (MTD): Month-to-date spending across all accounts.
Monthly forecast: Projected total spend for the current month based on usage trends.
Over-Budget: Total spend already exceeding configured budgets, with the number of accounts impacted.
At Risk: Total forecasted spend expected to exceed configured budgets, with the number of accounts impacted.
Total spending on 6 months: A 6-month historical trend of your overall AWS consumption, including the variation between the current forecast and last month.
A table below the summary lists each account with its actual spend, forecast, configured budget, and the differences between actual/forecast and budget. This makes it easy to spot the accounts that need attention first.
Budget Statuses
Each account is assigned one of the following statuses based on how it is tracking against its monthly budget:
Over-Budget: Current month-to-date consumption already exceeds the configured budget.
At Risk: Forecasted consumption for the current month is expected to exceed the configured budget.
On track: Current consumption is below the configured budget and forecast remains within the limit.
Underspending: Consumption is significantly below the configured budget, signalling a potential opportunity to right-size or reallocate budget.
No budget: No budget has been configured for this account yet.
Search and Filtering
The search bar above the accounts table lets you quickly narrow down the list. You can filter by:
Account: Find a specific account by name or ID.
Status: Focus on accounts in a specific state (for example, only Over-Budget or At Risk accounts).
What Is Not Tracked in Budgets
To keep your budget tracking focused on the AWS consumption you can actively manage, the following items are excluded from budget calculations:
AWS Marketplace expenses
Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) discounts
AWS Premium Support
Distributor Discount
Tax
Make sure to keep these items in mind when comparing Stable's budget figures with your AWS invoice, these line items are billed separately from the consumption tracked here.
Resources Excluded for Consistency
A few specific line items are not displayed in the Budget views to keep figures consistent with the actual consumption being tracked:
SavingsPlanNegation
SavingsPlanUpfrontFee
Fees associated with a reservation ARN
These entries are accounting artifacts tied to your commitments and would otherwise distort the cost picture for an account or a service.
Configuring a Budget
From the Budget Overview, click on "Set Budget" to open the budget configuration panel. The panel is designed to make setting an appropriate limit fast and informed:
6-month trend: A bar chart showing your consumption over the last six months, so you can see your historical baseline at a glance.
Default suggestion: Stable proposes a suggested monthly budget based on your recent consumption patterns. You can accept it or override it.
Budget limit (Monthly): Enter your target monthly amount.
We also recommend reviewing your AWS-native budgets to avoid creating duplicate alerting on the same accounts.
Account Detail View
Clicking an account from the Budget Overview opens its detail view, which helps you quickly understand why an account is over budget, at risk, or underspending.
Utilisation on 6 months: Same key indicators as the overview (Total actual spent, Monthly forecast, Over-Budget) but scoped to the selected account, including how much of your total budget has been consumed.
Total spending on 6 months: Account-level 6-month trend with the variation between the current forecast and last month.
Resources tab: Lists the individual resources driving the spend, sorted by the largest change first so you can immediately identify what shifted.
Services tab: Same view aggregated by AWS service, useful when you want to understand variation at the service level rather than per resource.
From the resources view, you can click See resources details to drill into a specific resource. From the services view, click See resources to list the resources behind a given service.
Automatic Notifications
Stable proactively notifies you when an account is heading off track. Two alerts are sent automatically:
Forecast exceeds budget (At Risk): The forecasted consumption for the current month is projected to go over the configured budget.
Actual exceeds budget (Over-Budget): The month-to-date consumption has already gone over the configured budget.
These alerts are designed to catch problems early, before the end of the billing cycle, so you can take action while it still matters.