OpenAI spend alerts that catch a spike before the invoice

The problem: dashboards show you the damage after it happens

The OpenAI usage dashboard updates hourly. Billing alerts, when they exist, fire on monthly totals — not on the speed of spend. A runaway loop that burns $1,000/hour can run for an entire workday before the monthly ceiling sends a notification. By then the invoice is in five figures.

Invoices arrive days or weeks after the billing period closes. The feedback loop is too slow to catch a spike in progress.

How ModelBrake catches it

ModelBrake polls the OpenAI admin usage API every 15 minutes. It compares the current day's spend against the median of your trailing days. When spend is running at 3× the median, it fires an alert — even if you are still under your monthly limit.

You can also set per-key spend ceilings. When a ceiling is crossed on the next poll, you get a critical alert. If you opt in to revoke-on-breach, ModelBrake can kill the application key automatically — but only with a separate write-scoped credential you provide deliberately.

What credential is needed

A read-only organization-level admin API key. This key can read usage and billing data but cannot call models, create application keys, or access prompts. Your application keys, prompts, and responses never touch ModelBrake infrastructure.

Read our security page for full details on credential encryption, isolation, and retention.

What we never see

• Your prompts or completions
• Your application API keys
• Your model inputs or outputs
• Any data routed through a proxy — because there is no proxy