Menu bar and background
A cost alert is worth something only while the money is still being spent. So CloudBridge keeps running after its window closes, refreshes on a schedule, and tells you when something fires.
The menu bar icon
On macOS and Windows, closing the window leaves CloudBridge in the menu bar (the notification area on Windows). The icon's title is the month's spend, $2.8k, and the cloud carries an exclamation mark while any alert is open.
Click it for a panel with the month to date, the month-end forecast, the open alerts and the services that moved most against last month, with Refresh and Open CloudBridge. Clicking an alert opens it on the Alerts page. Right-click the icon — or use Quit in the panel — to quit; closing the window no longer does. The Dock icon comes and goes with the window.
To have closing the window quit instead, turn off Settings → Background → Keep running in the menu bar. The icon goes at once; the schedule and notifications then run only while the window is open, and a login launch opens the window rather than starting hidden.
Linux builds have no tray icon and still quit with their window; the schedule and notifications run while it is open.
The background refresh
CloudBridge fetches each account once its refresh interval has passed (Settings → Refreshing, 24 hours by default), runs the alert rules and posts a notification for each new alert. So the schedule costs what clicking Refresh once a day would.
Every 15 minutes it checks whether an account has become due. That check reads only the local ledger; it sends nothing to a provider. The 15 minutes decides how soon after a laptop wakes, or a failure clears, a due account is fetched — not how often one is. Turn the schedule off under Settings → Background → Refresh in the background.
Open at login
Settings → Background → Open at login starts CloudBridge when you log in, in the menu bar and without its window, so alerts keep arriving after a restart. It is off until you turn it on; macOS lists it under System Settings → General → Login Items.
When a refresh fails
- An account that keeps failing is retried after 15 minutes, then 30, doubling up to the refresh interval, so a revoked key or a provider outage costs a handful of tries a day rather than one every tick. A notification says when an account starts failing — its spend has stopped being watched — and the panel names it until it recovers.
- A fetch the provider answered but CloudBridge could not store — a full disk, say — is not repeated within the refresh interval, so the same Cost Explorer requests or S3 downloads are not paid for twice. Force Refresh retries at once.
- One month failing does not stop the other: last month's trouble does not leave this month, where a runaway shows, unfetched.