Can I get an alert when my OpenAI credit balance is low?

Not on the balance itself: OpenAI exposes no balance API, and its console notifications are thresholds on spend. Alert on monthly spend against your cap, or track the balance yourself after each top-up.

Does Anthropic send low balance emails?

The Claude Console lets you add notification thresholds on workspace and organization spend limits, and shows the credit balance on the billing page. The balance isn't available from the Admin API.

How do I alert on OpenRouter credits?

Poll GET https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/credits; total_credits minus total_usage is your balance in USD. Alert when it crosses a threshold, or better, when days of runway left drops under a week.

Set a low-balance alert for OpenAI, Anthropic and OpenRouter

What each console's own alerts do, what they can't see, and how to alert on days of runway left instead of a dollar threshold.

OpenAI and Anthropic both let you set spend notifications and limits in their consoles, but those fire on spend, not on remaining balance, and neither exposes the balance through its API. OpenRouter does: poll GET /api/v1/credits and alert when total_credits − total_usage gets low. Whatever the provider, alert on days of runway left, not a dollar figure.

What each provider gives you

	OpenAI	Anthropic	OpenRouter
Native alert	Spend alerts and hard spend limits per org or project	Spend limits and notification thresholds per workspace and org	Credit limit per key
Balance over API	No	No	Yes, GET /api/v1/credits
Spend over API	Daily, GET /v1/organization/costs	Daily, GET /v1/organizations/cost_report	Per call (usage.cost)
Error at zero	429 insufficient_quota	400 credit balance too low	402

Sources: OpenAI spend limits, Claude Console workspaces, OpenRouter credits. Native limits are worth setting whatever else you do: they're the only thing that actually stops spend.

A dollar threshold is the wrong alert

$20 left is a week on a quiet project and an hour during an eval run. The alert you want is "this runs out before I'll be back": days to zero, which is balance over burn per day. A 7-day warning gives you time to top up; a 3-day one means now. Those are the thresholds Argus uses for credits_low and credits_critical. The math is in estimating runway.

Do it yourself for OpenRouter

The cheapest working version is a cron job with curl and jq:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Run hourly from cron. Alerts when OpenRouter credits drop under $10.
set -euo pipefail
remaining=$(curl -sf https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/credits \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENROUTER_API_KEY" \
  | jq '.data.total_credits - .data.total_usage')
if (( $(echo "$remaining < 10" | bc -l) )); then
  curl -sf -X POST "$SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL" \
    -d "{\"text\": \"OpenRouter balance is \$$remaining\"}"
fi

It works, and it has the gaps every one-off script has: it fires every hour until you top up, it knows one provider, and it can't tell a slow week from a runaway one.

With Argus

Low balance: fires under a USD threshold, for any provider with a readable balance.
Days to zero: fires when runway at the current burn drops under N days.
Spend spike: fires when week-over-week spend rises by a percentage you set.
Projected overage: fires when projected month-end spend reaches a USD amount you set.
Rate-limit headroom, error rate and cost drift, for the failures that aren't about money running out.
Each rule watches one connection or all of them, fires once by email, and re-arms when the condition clears.

For OpenAI and Anthropic, where there's no balance to read, use spend spike and projected overage. Your coding agent sees the same warnings through get_advisories over MCP.

Questions

Can I get an alert when my OpenAI credit balance is low?: Not on the balance itself: OpenAI exposes no balance API, and its console notifications are thresholds on spend. Alert on monthly spend against your cap, or track the balance yourself after each top-up.
Does Anthropic send low balance emails?: The Claude Console lets you add notification thresholds on workspace and organization spend limits, and shows the credit balance on the billing page. The balance isn't available from the Admin API.
How do I alert on OpenRouter credits?: Poll GET https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/credits; total_credits minus total_usage is your balance in USD. Alert when it crosses a threshold, or better, when days of runway left drops under a week.