I’m a developer and business owner. Over the past year I funded my OpenAI API account with $1,060 across five separate purchases - $10, $50, $200, $51, and $750. All paid with my credit card.
Last month I went to use my balance and found it was $0.00. Every dollar had expired.
I never received a single notification. No email. No in-app alert. No warning of any kind. I had no idea prepaid credits could even expire.
I contacted support. Over 5+ emails, I asked three times for escalation. Each time, ignored. Eventually a second agent responded and told me plainly:
“OpenAI does not guarantee expiration reminder notifications.”
There is no appeals process.
So let me make sure I understand this correctly: OpenAI accepted $1,060 from me, set a silent countdown, never told me about it, and now says the money is just gone - and there’s nothing anyone can do?
I don’t want a refund. I want to use the credits I paid for, on OpenAI’s platform. That’s all.
Has anyone here dealt with this? Were you able to get your credits reinstated?
Wanted to drop my opinion, I hope they reinstate your credits. I have purchased them twice now, 1K $40 each time and I had no idea they expire. I even clicked through to buy more credits -
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I just went through my entire OpenAI platform dashboard trying to find where expiration information is even displayed. Here’s what I found.
Support told me (exact quote): “Customers are responsible for monitoring their credit balance and expiration information through their account billing or usage dashboard.”
So I checked every page:
Billing Overview - Shows my balance ($0.00). No expiration dates anywhere. No warnings.
Billing History - Shows my 5 paid invoices totaling $1,061. All marked “Paid.” No expiration information of any kind.
Usage Dashboard - Shows usage charts. No expiration information.
None of those pages - show expiration dates.
The only place expiration dates appear is a separate tab called “Credit Grants.”
Think about that name for a second. A “grant” implies something given for free - a promotional credit, a coupon, not something that you purchase with your money. Why would I check a page called “Credit Grants” to monitor money I paid for? Every other page calls them “credits” or “credit balance”. Its the one page with the critical expiration info uses a different term.
So when support says customers should “monitor their credit balance through the billing or usage dashboard” those pages literally don’t have the information they’re referring to.
Another update. After looking at the dashboard, I went back and pulled up every piece of communication OpenAI sent me when I purchased these credits. I wanted to see if expiration was mentioned anywhere at all.
The funding confirmation email says: “We charged $750.00 to your credit card ending in XXXX to fund your OpenAI API credit balance”. It then directs me to “review your billing history at any time”. That’s it. No mention of expiration. No mention of a 12-month limit. No mention of “Credit Grants”. It sends me to Billing History - the page that, as I showed in my last update, doesn’t display expiration dates.
The invoice describes the purchase as “OpenAI API usage credit”. No mention of expiration.
The receipt - same thing. “OpenAI API usage credit”. No mention of expiration.
So here’s the full picture:
The purchase email doesn’t mention expiration
The invoice doesn’t mention expiration
The receipt doesn’t mention expiration
The Billing Overview page doesn’t show expiration
The Billing History page (where the email sends you) doesn’t show expiration
The Usage Dashboard doesn’t show expiration
The ONLY place expiration appears is a tab called “Credit Grants” - a name that doesn’t match any language used in any of those other documents
And then when your credits vanish, support tells you it was your responsibility to track it. Track it where? Through what?
Prepaid credits expiring has been there since they introduced and started forcing accounts to this in early 2024. That intentional breakage is there despite it being represented as real money not abstracted, and being directly used on an organization that requires personal identity verification, thus being directly linked as a consumer one-to-one service value store account.
Profit and theft is built-in by design. The only way you will be able to proceed effectively is if you are in a jurisdiction where this business practice is directly outlawed, with government assistance or by direct citation of those laws, and that law carries significant threat to the operation of the company itself in that nation-state if customers are not satisfied.
Thank you - this is a really useful framing, and I think you’re right that the expiration policy is intentional, not an oversight.
What stands out to me, though, is that this isn’t just about the terms existing somewhere in a legal document. It’s about OpenAI actively directing customers away from the information. Their own funding email calls it a “credit balance” and points you to Billing History. The invoice says “API usage credit.” Neither page mentions expiration. The only place it appears is a tab called “Credit Grants” which no paying customer would intuitively check.
So even if the terms say credits expire, OpenAI’s own communications ensure you’d never know that in practice. That’s the part I think goes beyond just having unfavorable terms - it’s a customer-facing design that obscures a material condition of the purchase.
I’ve been digging through this forum, and the pattern is striking. I’ll share what I’ve found in my next update.
I think you made some very good points, especially about the terminology around credits and grants, and how difficult it can be to tell how many credits are left and which ones will expire soon.
I found threads going back to November 2023 - over two years - from developers reporting the exact same experience: paid credits expired without notification, support sends scripted responses, and escalation requests were ignored.
In nearly every thread, a support representative eventually says something along the lines of "your feedback will be shared with the relevant teams”. That same line has appeared since late 2023.
Two and a half years. The same complaint, the same “feedback will be shared” promise, the same outcome - nothing changes. No notification system added. Expiration is still hidden behind the “Credit Grants” label. Emails and invoices still make no mention of it.
Reading through these threads, individual developers are each discovering the same thing the same way. And each being told the same thing I was: that it’s their responsibility to track information the platform actively obscures.
At some point, “we’ll share your feedback” isn’t a promise. It’s a script as highlighted in one of the previous comments.
One more thing I found while reading through those threads.
In December 2024, a developer posted about losing ~$500 in expired credits. Same story as mine - no notification, same scripted support response, same initial refusal.
But then on December 28, they came back and reported that their credits had been reinstated. OpenAI granted them a new balance matching what they’d lost, with a fresh 12-month expiration. You can read the thread here: https://community.openai.com/t/paid-credits-expired-wth/1041718
And that’s not the only case. On Reddit, I’ve also come across another developer who lost $2,500 in expired credits and was able to get them reinstated.
So that’s at least two documented cases where OpenAI reinstated expired credits.
Now compare that to what support told me:
“Support teams are not able to grant exceptions to the 12-month expiration policy.”
“Escalation for manual restoration or exception handling is not available in this scenario.”
If exceptions aren’t available, how were credits reinstated in those cases? If support can’t grant them, who did? This isn’t a rhetorical question - it directly contradicts what I was told.
I have bought the credit in 2023… that’s a whole different story. There was nothing written about money disapearing on the buyers page back than.
On top of that I am also a Regular in this community - like a piece of furniture in your own house.
File a complaint with the BBB. I have had decent experiences with doing this when support either ignored you, gives you the run around, or some corporate script for what they are allowed to say.
Thank you - I’ll keep that in mind. If OpenAI doesn’t offer a resolution, BBB is definitely on the list.
I’ve also been looking into a couple of other options:
Credit card dispute - Visa allows up to 540 days to file a claim when services paid for were not provided. Given that I have written confirmation that no notification was sent and that the dashboard pages I was directed to don’t even display expiration info, I think there’s a reasonable case there.
State Bureau of Consumer Protection - filing a complaint through the Attorney General’s office. Prepaid funds forfeited without notice, with expiration terms absent from the purchase email, invoice, and receipt, seems like it falls in their scope.
I still would prefer on resolving this directly with OpenAI first - I’d rather just use the credits I paid for than go through any of these processes. But it’s good to know the options are there.
Has anyone here gone through any of these routes? Credit card dispute, or a state consumer protection complaint - for something like this? I’d be curious to hear how it went.
Credit card dispute is pretty much an instant ban, from prior anecdote. You have to decide if you are willing to ever do business again with a company with such expiration policy, and will likely want to first make it so your card cannot be hit again for further charges.
