Spikewatch ยท pre-launch
Know when your AI bill jumps, before the invoice does.
Get hourly alerts when your API spend runs 3x above normal. Paste a read-only key, set Slack or email, done. Spikewatch reads your AI API usage once an hour and sends one message when spend crosses three times your normal level.
Try the live checker: paste your hourly AI spend and see which hours would have sent an alert. The hourly job is open source.
The job it does
- Connect a read-only keyIt can see usage numbers. It cannot make requests or change anything.
- It learns your normalEach hour is compared with your trailing average for that time of day.
- You get one messageOnly when spend crosses the line you set. Default is 3x.
Who it is for
- Small teams running agents or batch jobs that call AI APIs on their own.
- Founders who pay the bill personally and look at it once a month.
- Anyone who found out a loop ran all night from the invoice.
What it is not
- Not a hard cap. It never switches your service off.
- Not a tracing tool. No prompts or responses are read or stored.
- Not a dashboard to check. You hear from it only when something is wrong.
No manual work after launch
Signup, billing, hourly checks and alerts are all automated. No calls, no onboarding, no support queue needed to run it.
First version scope
- Hourly check. A scheduled job reads each customer's usage and cost report and compares it with their trailing normal for that hour.
- One small database. Stores the key (encrypted), the hourly numbers and the alert settings.
- Alert delivery. Slack webhook or email. Nothing else in version one.
- Known risks. Provider API rate limits are low at one call per customer per hour. Billing runs through a merchant of record because Stripe is invite-only in India; onboarding for a solo founder still has to be confirmed.
Where it stands today
| Provider | Status |
|---|---|
| Anthropic | Usage and cost reports available through the Admin API. Anthropic API access is confirmed. First integration. |
| OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter | Not checked yet. Added only after confirming they expose usage data. |
Founding price for the first teams. Billed monthly in USD, cancel any time. Nobody is charged before the first integration is live.
$15 is the test price. Other tools in this area start at about $29 a month and are built for debugging, not for spend alerts. Spikewatch is a pre-launch idea and nothing is for sale yet.