Guard and Budgets
Common questions about Guard projects, budgets, scans, and cost governance.
What is Guard?
Guard is frugally.app's cost governance engine. It helps you set budgets, track compliance, detect policy violations, and enforce approval workflows before infrastructure changes happen. See Guard Overview for a full introduction.
How do budgets work?
A budget sets a spending limit for a specific scope — such as a project, service, account, or tag group. frugally.app tracks actual AWS spend against the budget and alerts you when thresholds are breached.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Where does cost data come from? | AWS Cost Explorer. Your Connection must have Cost Explorer enabled and verified |
| How often is spend updated? | Cost data refreshes periodically — typically within 24 hours of the spend occurring in AWS |
| Can I set multiple thresholds? | Yes — e.g. alert at 80% and again at 100% |
| What happens when a budget is exceeded? | A violation is created and notifications are sent to the configured channels |
For details, see Budgets.
What are Guard scans?
Guard scans evaluate your cloud resources against compliance and cost-optimisation rules. Scans produce findings — specific issues with recommendations for remediation.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| How often do scans run? | Configurable per project — daily, weekly, or on-demand |
| Do scans consume credits? | Yes. See Credit Usage and Enforcement |
| Can I suppress false positives? | Yes — individual findings can be suppressed with a reason |
For details, see Scans and Findings.
What is a Guard project?
A project is a governance container that groups Connections, budgets, approval rules, and scan configurations together. Projects let you apply different governance policies to different parts of your infrastructure.
For details, see Projects.
Do I need approval rules?
Approval rules are optional. They add an approval workflow for infrastructure changes — useful for production environments or changes above a certain cost threshold. You can configure approval rules per project.
For details, see Approval Rules.
What plan do I need for Guard?
| Feature | Free | Pro | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Budgets | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Guard projects | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Scans | Manual only | Scheduled + manual | Scheduled + manual |
| Approval workflows | — | Basic | Advanced (multi-level) |
See Plans and Credits for the full plan comparison.