OpenAI says my prepaid credits were consumed, refuses to show any record

Posted by ppavlyuk 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by pton_xd 1 day ago

OpenRouter expired my credits because they were "too old" (more than 12 months old). Didn't realize credits would rot like that.

Comment by oidar 1 day ago

Anthropic does that as well. I lost $200, so I now I pay as I go and don't worry about "sales"

Comment by mrtksn 1 day ago

OpenRouter does that too? What kind of dystopia we got in.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by InsideOutSanta 1 day ago

I wonder in how many places this is just flat-out illegal.

Comment by bryanlarsen 1 day ago

Me too. I hope the $4 they gained was worth more than the hundreds or thousands I could have potentially spent in the future if they hadn't deliberately alienated me.

Comment by canadiantim 1 day ago

must've been organic, non-gmo credits

Comment by tom1337 1 day ago

That’s pretty common. While I agree it’s not ideal for users, having credits that never expire is a headache for businesses. They’d effectively owe you compute forever, which complicates accounting. It also makes pricing changes harder, since people could keep using credits they bought at much lower prices. And, of course, if credits expire before they’re used, the company ends up keeping the money without having to provide the service. At least OpenAI shows you the expiration of your credits pretty easily...

Comment by mrtksn 1 day ago

They should do refunds if they don’t like holding it.

Comment by bryanlarsen 1 day ago

Headache is just an excuse. Accounting for uncollectible receivables and their inverse has a standard accounting practice.

Comment by InsideOutSanta 1 day ago

"Not ideal for users" is a fun way to describe what is essentially theft.

Comment by tom1337 1 day ago

If you buy groceries and let them expire in your fridge because you forgot to use them, did the grocery store stole the money from you?

Comment by baubino 1 day ago

Not equivalent because the product purchased hasn’t yet been redeemed in the case of the credits. The equivalent would be buying a gift card from a grocery store and then the store saying you can’t use the card because it expired.

Comment by viccis 1 day ago

False equivalence fallacy

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by InsideOutSanta 1 day ago

Did the store make the groceries expire?

Comment by exe34 1 day ago

Did the credits rot? What if the store came to your house and took the vegetables away? Is that theft?

Comment by OutOfHere 1 day ago

Your argument is complete nonsense, considering that numerous services, e.g. Uber, Lyft, GrubHub, DoorDash etc. have purchased gift card credits that never expire. If these were to expire, it would be a clear case of theft. Your comment is an attempt at covering up fraud.

Comment by xtiansimon 18 hours ago

> “Your comment is an attempt at covering up fraud.”

I’m sorry, but you’re wrong about the facts. A gift certificate is a business liability under GAAP. And you’re not required to hold that liability forever.

FASB ASC 606 (Revenue from Contracts with Customers)

What’s more, Federal Law gives you only 5 years, but states may have additional protections,

“Under the law, a gift card cannot expire until at least five years from the date it was activated. The law also places general limitations on fees. For instance, the card issuer cannot charge a dormancy or inactivity fee on a gift card unless there has been no activity for one year and the card clearly states its policy toward that fee.”

The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (Credit CARD, 2009)

https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/news/december2019.ht...

Comment by nickthegreek 16 hours ago

There are several states where they are in fact required to hold the liability forever.

https://www.ncsl.org/financial-services/gift-cards-and-gift-...

Comment by bryanlarsen 15 hours ago

> A gift certificate is a business liability under GAAP. And you’re not required to hold that liability forever.

And an expectation that the liabilities will never be called is an offsetting asset. It never offsets to quite zero, but over time it gets pretty darn close.

Comment by OutOfHere 16 hours ago

> A gift certificate is a business liability

You say that, but you haven't explained how it is a liability, and I consider it debatable. In practice, there is a near-zero risk to a large firm in a statistical sense if the firm caps the max amount held per user to say $1000 or whatever the acceptable limit is. It's not as if millions of users are suddenly going to exercise their balances all at once unless the firm is going out of business anyway.

Cloud computing firms even allow me to keep tens of thousands of dollars in my account balance, with no expiration, which helps me ensure that my cloud services will keep running for years if not decades. There is just no strong case for OpenAI expiring unused balances after one year. In my prior comment, I already named various large firms that NEVER expire gift card balances.

The reputation loss from an expired balance is vastly more consequential. Thinking solely from an accounting pov is absurd.

Comment by bramhaag 1 day ago

This is just LLM output pasted on some forum, submitted to HN by the person who presumably made that post. What an incredibly low effort submission.

Comment by Drupon 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by jmkni 1 day ago

I had this too, brought some credits (around $50USD) around Christmas time and only used a small amount, went to look the other day and it showed me a balance of zero, also couldn't figure out what happened to them

Small enough amount of money that I didn't bother chasing it up, but surprising to see other people saying the same thing, maybe I will

Comment by khaledh 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by gumby 17 hours ago

If you’re in California you could try using consumer law and small claims court (no lawyer needed). On one hand that would be extra work for a small amount of money, but on the other hand it wouldn’t be a lot of work, could upend the entire situation for everyone (across LOTS of SaaS), and be kind of fun. You win in small claims, it hits HN, and some big law firm launches a class action.

There are two relevant laws. One controls gift cards and credits, which in California are valid for a minimum of 10 years regardless of what the company may say. Companies make a surprisingly significant amount of money on selling credits and expiring them from their balance sheet.

The second law is a requirement that they issue itemized receipts. If they can’t give you an itemized accounting of how they managed your money (because, as noted above, it’s your money until you spend it) that’s fraud.

Have fun!

Comment by achille 1 day ago

file a ccpa data access request, they either have data to backup the usage (and must release it) or they don't have it (and should fix the issue)

Comment by OutOfHere 1 day ago

Note that credits can also be consumed by theft of the API key, not only by expiration.

Comment by mrtksn 1 day ago

Some time ago I found out that OpenAI API balance gets wiped out after a year. Still bitter about it, telecom operator shit and it’s giving me the creeps when sama talks about AI being like an utility. Good luck.

Comment by kingstnap 1 day ago

They need better clairty on it for sure, ideally with a clear warning on deposit. But apparently a non-expiring credit is a considered an accounting problem since you have income (deposit) associated with a contract liability (credits) that could end up making a headache if it splays across a bunch of fiscal years.

You can setup limits though to minimize loss. For example you can say auto reload $5 when your account hits $5 with an absolute monthly limit of $40. Then you don't have risk of losing more than the roughly ~$5 you have in an account.

Comment by mrtksn 1 day ago

how convenient that they are solving their accounting problems with taking away your money instead of doing a refund.

Comment by kingstnap 1 day ago

I mean it could be problematic if taxes and the credit card fees are involved right.

It would be interesting to see something like:

$100 credits and $13 in taxes refunded as

$97 in refund after merchent fee + $12.61 as reversed taxes.

It's objectively better than nothing for sure. But the thing about this is such complicated nuanced solutions tend to get not done.

Comment by wat10000 1 day ago

Many US states don’t allow gift cards to expire. Companies still sell gift cards there. It may be an accounting problem but clearly it can be dealt with. Of course they’d rather steal your money than deal with it.

Comment by pshirshov 1 day ago

> I was a happy OpenAI customer.

Do they care?

> $379 spent on credits in July alone

Still heavily subsidized, you should be thankful they let you use a bit of their compute.

> July 9. My Codex balance - 491.8 credits - vanished to zero.

Well, someone failed a couple of RAFT cornercases. Happens. They are smart boys and will (eventually) make their RAFT consistent.

> Then I asked one simple question: what exactly did I pay for?

You financed development of AGI which will be here soon (er or later) and will make you happy.

> If you prepay OpenAI for credits, know this: if they ever disappear, the company’s official position is that you are not entitled to know where they went.

It very well might be they also have no idea. In a multi-trillion industry your personal signal is just some noise well below noise level.

Also, if you are unhappy with OpenAI - try Anthropic and don't be surprised when you waste $200 in API credits in TWO single requests (not prompts). If you are not happy with Anthropic - give Kimi a try, they still could surprise you even after Anthropic.