# Menu bar and background

> Keep CloudBridge watching with its window closed: spend in the menu bar, a daily background refresh, notifications, Open at login and safe retries.

Source: https://cloudbridge.jetsquirrel.cloud/docs/background

**[中文](zh/background.md)** [Docs](index.md)

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 {#menu-bar}

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 {#schedule}

CloudBridge fetches each account once its refresh interval has passed
(**Settings → Refreshing**, 24 hours by default), runs the
[alert rules](alerts.md) 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 {#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 {#failures}

- **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.