Recipe

Set a monthly data budget that resets on renewal day

A Kilobat budget belongs to one network. It can start over daily, weekly, or monthly on the day your plan renews.

Needs Kilobat Pro in the appStopping new connections needs the network filterChecked: 29 October 2026

In the app

Join the network that has the data plan.
Open Settings in Kilobat and find Data budget.
Set the budget for this network in GB.
Set Starts over to Monthly. Then set Day of the month to the day your plan renews.
Under Alerts, click 50%, 80% or 100% to get a notification once per cycle.
To limit one app, click its row in the app list and click Set a quota…

With the CLI

Set a 30 GB budget that starts over on day 14 of each month, with three alerts.
```
kilobat limit 30 --cycle monthly --reset-day 14 --alert 50,80,100
```
Read the budget and the use in this cycle.
```
kilobat limit
```
Output For example: Budget: 20 GB · Until reset, then the use in this cycle and the alerts.

Limit the uploads of one app to 2 GB per cycle.

kilobat quota com.getdropbox.dropbox 2 --upload

List the app quotas and their use.
```
kilobat quota --list
```

Through MCP

Connect the MCP server once with claude mcp add kilobat -- kilobat mcp. For other clients, see the docs. Then an agent can call these tools. Tools that change settings tell the agent to ask you first.

Tool and arguments	What it does
`set_budget` `{"gb": 30, "cycle": "monthly", "reset_day": 14, "alerts": "50,80,100"}`	Set the current network's budget and when it starts over.
`set_app_quota` `{"app": "com.getdropbox.dropbox", "gb": 2, "direction": "upload"}`	Limit one app per budget cycle.
`list_rules`	The `budget` with `usedBytes` and when it `resets`, and the app `quotas`.

Good to know

If your plan renews on the 31st, the budget starts on the last day of shorter months.
With filtering on, new connections stop when the budget is used up in Travel and Work. Unrestricted only tracks it.
Kilobat samples traffic every second. An app can go a little over before it stops.
The budget counts Internet traffic only. Local network and AirDrop traffic do not count.

Questions

Does the budget continue after a restart?

Yes. A budget with a cycle counts the usage history of that network.

My carrier shows a different total. Which is right?

Kilobat sees only this Mac. Compare the same period with Compare Kilobat with your carrier's data figure.

Sources

Sources checked on 29 October 2026. Man pages are the ones installed with macOS; open one with man <name> in Terminal.