# How do I set a budget alert for Vertex AI spend? > Create a budget on the billing account with alerts at 50%, 90% and 100% of a monthly amount. The default is 50; alerts only, nothing is cut off. Source: https://docs.applane.dev/gcp-admins/budget-alerts/ **Who:** GCP admin, or a billing admin **Time:** 2 minutes Gemini tokens are billed to your project at Google's list price. A budget alert is the control. It sends email to the billing admins at 50%, 90% and 100% of a monthly amount. It never cuts anything off. Every [setup option](https://docs.applane.dev/gcp-admins/setup/) creates one when you pass a billing account. The default amount is 50 in the billing account's currency (EUR or USD for most accounts). For scale: a full day of building in our own testing used $0.59 of tokens. ## Find the billing account ```bash gcloud billing projects describe --format='value(billingAccountName)' ``` The value looks like `billingAccounts/XXXXXX-XXXXXX-XXXXXX`; the part after the slash is ``. ## Create it by hand ```bash gcloud services enable billingbudgets.googleapis.com --project gcloud billing budgets create --billing-account= \ --display-name=applane-vertex- \ --budget-amount=50 \ --filter-projects=projects/ \ --threshold-rule=percent=0.5 --threshold-rule=percent=0.9 --threshold-rule=percent=1.0 ``` Creating a budget needs `roles/billing.costsManager` on the billing account, which project owners do not always have. If the command is refused, ask a billing admin to run it or to create the budget in the console under **Billing > Budgets & alerts**. ## Skip it Leave out `--budget-account` (script) or `billing_account_id` (Terraform, Infrastructure Manager) if finance manages budgets elsewhere. Everything else works the same. ## Remove it ```bash gcloud billing budgets list --billing-account= gcloud billing budgets delete --billing-account= ```