AWS Budget Notifications for Discord Channels

Publish date: 2025-07-31

Overview

Send AWS Budget Alerts straight to a Discord channel that you have Webhook Integration permissions for. The budget_type is COST and the time_unit is MONTHLY. Users can provide:

budget_threshold
limit_unit
limit_amount

For example, setting a monthly budget of $20 USD and wanting to be alerted when it's forecasted to go over 70% of the budget, you'd set:

limit_unit = "USD"
limit_amount = 20
budget_threshold = 70

Three secrets are needed in /secrets.auto.tfvars:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY: AWS Access Key with access to Lambda, SNS, Budgets, and IAM. See: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_credentials_access-keys.html
AWS_SECRET_KEY: AWS Secret Key. See: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_credentials_access-keys.html
WEBHOOK_URL: A webhook URL for the targeted Discord channel to send notifications to. Just need the URL, See the "Making a Webhook" section here: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/228383668-Intro-to-Webhooks

And one last non-secret config variable in /terraform.auto.tfvars:

AWS_REGION: Primary region to deploy to

Demo

Published on Public Registry: aliAljaffer/budgets-discord-notifs

Video demo: https://youtu.be/Qp13gmzzybI

The Problem

Wanted to create an extra method of delivery for AWS Budget alerts - as sometimes I don't check my email urgently enough. And one time the alert ended up in "junk" mail. So this is an approach to remedy that :)

Approach

Learning Terraform, so decided to automate the infra and deploy as a module on Public Registry. The architecture is simple enough, all it creates is a budget alert that sends notifications to an SNS topic, and that triggers a Lambda to hit the Discord channel webhook URL with the message.

This is the model tree:

.
├── modules
│   ├── budgets
│   │   ├── outputs.tf
│   │   ├── terraform.tf
│   │   └── variables.tf
│   ├── iam
│   │   ├── datasource.tf
│   │   ├── outputs.tf
│   │   ├── terraform.tf
│   │   └── variables.tf
│   ├── lambda
│   │   ├── function
│   │   │   ├── main.py
│   │   │   └── requirements.txt
│   │   ├── datasource.tf
│   │   ├── outputs.tf
│   │   ├── terraform.tf
│   │   └── variables.tf
│   └── sns
│       ├── datasource.tf
│       ├── outputs.tf
│       ├── terraform.tf
│       └── variables.tf
├── LICENSE
├── main.tf
├── providers.tf
├── README.md
├── secrets.example.auto.tfvars
├── terraform.auto.tfvars
└── variables.tf

Architectural Design

System Design for the project, showing VCS where Terraform module is stored and the resources that are deployed

Key Outcomes

Automated budget alerts to a channel on Discord
Tagged resources using AWS Tags, helps track spending, logs, and resource lookup.
Allows the user to set different budget variables like limit_amount, limit_unit, budget_threshold, and AWS_REGION.