budget-guardian
Budget Guardian
A spend tripwire for your Google Ads MCC. Scans every enabled account in your MCC every 2 hours. If month-to-date spend crosses 100% or 120% of the monthly budget you set, it pings Slack. Alert-only — never pauses campaigns.
Pairs with Shared Budget Updater — the execution arm: it pushes sheet-approved budgets; the Guardian is the tripwire watching what gets spent against them.
Why this exists
Two threats with the same shape — a spend spike nobody noticed until the damage was done.
The first is fat-fingering: a wrong formula or stale value in a budget sheet quietly pushing the wrong number across multiple accounts. The second is the industry-wide trend of hijacked MCCs and malicious spend — unauthorized PMax campaigns at huge daily budgets, drained accounts, agency-level changes nobody approved.
Daily checks miss the first 23 hours of either one. A 2-hour cron with per-threshold dedupe gets detection to ~2 hours, with one alert per account per threshold per month so Slack doesn't get spammed.