API charged $300+ above spending hard limit

My account broke through the hard limit and spent 10x more than expected. My hard limit was set to $110 when my current usage was at $80, limiting all potential charges to $30, but my current usage shows $489, which is even higher than the allowed monthly quota of $400 for my account. The budget-limiting engine seems to be broken. The support is ignoring me both in the chat and email.

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Yikes… I’ll be keeping an eye on mine, haven’t played with it enough yet so I am still below my limit.

Seems like there’s lots of problems with their budgeting and subscription billing modules.

Same here! :smiling_face_with_tear:
It seems like the hard limit doesn’t stop the usage as intended:

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I had the same situation, openai charged me 148 dollars on one day but I couldn’t have used that much on a Saturday, my hard limit is only 5 dollars. I have tried to reach openai by email or chatbot, but no response at all for already 7 days. I wonder if your problem is solved. Any suggestion will be helpful.

Welcome to the developer forum.

You must contact the help site to report this, if you follow this link it will give you detailed instructions as what to include, then you can use the Bot in the bottom right corner to start the session and give your details.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7242626-how-can-i-report-fraud-or-suspicious-activity

For me they just silently updated the balance next month to fix this. Then a few months later reached out on email, I guess after they got more people in support department to properly process the incoming messages.

Does anyone know how the over-spending happened in the first place? Was API key stolen? Account hacked. Just a miscalculation by billing?