Usage & spend management

Track your team's screenshot usage, understand what happens at your plan limit, and set spend thresholds to get notified or pause builds.

Argos bills on screenshot usage, so keeping an eye on it is how you keep costs under control. This page covers where to find your usage, what happens when you reach your plan's limit, and how to cap spending with spend management.

How usage is counted

Argos counts every screenshot registered in a build during the billing period. A few rules worth knowing:

• Unchanged screenshots count. Every screenshot in a build counts toward your quota, whether or not it differs from the baseline — comparing is the work Argos does on each one.
• Failed builds count. Screenshots count once their upload completes, including builds whose test suite failed or that errored during comparison. A build that never finishes uploading contributes nothing.

Monitor your usage

To see your team's usage details:

1. From the dashboard, select your team from the scope selector.
2. Select the Settings tab and go to the Billing section.

The plan card showing screenshot usage in the Billing settings

The plan card breaks down your consumption:

• Private project: Screenshots taken from private projects. These count toward your plan limit and are subject to charges.
• Public project: Screenshots taken from open-source projects.

What happens at your plan's limit

When you approach your plan's included screenshots, Argos alerts you. What happens when you exceed them depends on your plan:

• Hobby plan: Uploads are paused until the next billing period. To keep uploading, upgrade to the Pro plan — you can transfer your project to a newly created team.
• Pro plan (Stripe, usage-based): Extra screenshots are billed at the per-screenshot rate. Uploads continue uninterrupted — use spend management to cap the extra cost.
• Pro plan (GitHub Marketplace, fixed size): Uploads are paused until the next billing period. To keep uploading, upgrade your plan to a larger size (S, M, L, XL).

Manage your spend

Spend management is available on Pro and Enterprise plans with usage-based pricing.

Spend management lets you act automatically when your team reaches a spend amount you set:

• Get notified when you reach thresholds of your spend amount.
• Pause builds on all your projects when the amount is reached.

The spend amount covers additional screenshots beyond your plan's included usage, across all projects on your team. It does not include separate add-ons, which Argos charges per billing period. The amount is set per billing cycle, and Argos checks your usage against it at every build.

Setting a spend amount does not stop usage by itself. To stop builds at the amount, keep the Pause builds option enabled.

Set a spend amount

To configure spend management, you need the Owner role on your team.

1

Open your team's billing settings

From the dashboard, select your team from the scope selector, then open the Settings tab and go to the Billing section.

2

Enable Spend Management

Scroll to Spend Management and enable the switch.

The Spend Management section enabled in Billing settings

3

Set your spend amount

Enter the amount at which you want to be notified or take action. Setting the amount halfway through a billing cycle takes your current spend into account — if you set it below what you have already spent, the configured actions (including pausing projects) trigger immediately.

Threshold notifications

Once a spend amount is set, Argos emails all team owners when spending reaches 50%, 75%, and 100% of the amount. The thresholds are not customizable.

Pause builds at the spend amount

When spend management is enabled, the Pause builds option is on by default: once your team reaches the spend amount, Argos pauses builds for all projects on the team. To confirm the option, enter the team slug and select Continue.

When builds are paused, creating a new build fails with an error explaining that the spend amount was reached. Your CI builds will fail until you increase the spend amount or disable the Pause builds option.