A free model quota is a budget, not a gift. You should treat it like one if you plan to build anything on top of it. I learned this the hard way when my prototype stopped responding in the middle of a demo. I had silently burned through the monthly allowance, and the provider cut me off without warning. This article shows how I built a small token budget alarm on a free server. It watches a free model's usage and warns me before the quota runs out. Most developers track their cloud spend reli...