API Dashboard Chat interface says I need to add credits to access models

[Hiva62]

Hello, this is my first post.

I signed up for the API yesterday and added my payment card and purchased $10 of credits. I’m on Tier 1. I can access the models fine through the Responses API. However when I try to use other models in the Chat tab, they are greyed out with a hovering message saying: “Add Credits to access these models”. Which is confusing because I already have credits.

Can anyone shed some light whether this is a bug? Is this because I didn’t use the Persona verification or maybe I need to add more credits? Thank you.

[LarisaHaster]

Hi and welcome to the community @Hiva62!

Some API model access can depend on organization verification.

You can read more about verification from this: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organization-verification

[_j]

@Hiva62

when I try to use other models in the Chat tab, they are greyed out

It sounds to me like the tier didn’t fullly upgrade from “free”, and you just have the limited free trial model.

Here is the place to check your tier level, with it showing alongside the page header, and also in a center graph that has a green color bar that grows.

https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/limits

Free tier still will have significant limits and limited models when you expand “all models”, such as 3 RPM, 50 RPD all over the place, on models that should be unable to be called if you have no credits purchased ever.

You can ensure you have selected the correct organization that made the purchase, lower-left, and the default project of that org, upper-left in the platform site.

If you have your paid balance showing in the selected organization under “billing”, and you have that line item of the payment under “credit grants”, then there is nothing that should stop you from using the majority of OpenAI models. The exact gating of API features and models by ID verification (plus video selfie facial recognition), such as not being able to use gpt-image generation or streaming responses, was a help page now removed. You may need to hard-refresh the platform site (ctrl-refresh, shift-refresh,…) if you’ve had any page constantly open since making the payment.

I have my own “playground” site that will take an API key, and make direct calls to OpenAI. It doesn’t use any server resources, and will store data in your browser’s local storage. It doesn’t deny you attempts based on some separate “did they pay” backend API. It has a “refresh models” button upper right next to model selection so you can see what model IDs your org can call, an API call you can make for free, and you can see any error you get making calls to “chat” against a variety of API models when you send messages. The page does not stream so as to not to trigger any additional ID verification gates.

MyPlayground

If an issue persists for you, you can either pay in another $5, and see if that causes a proper re-trigger, or contact OpenAI support via help.openai.com for proper tier provisioning, and wait quite a while.

[Hiva62]

Thank you both @LarisaHaster and @_j for the fast replies!

Just giving an update that I’m still trying: I added another $5 to my Credit, but it didn’t re-trigger / fix the issue. I selected all the models under Project → Settings → Limits → Model Usage → Allowed models, which also didn’t fix the issue. I tried hard-refresh; log out/in, but no luck.

I contacted Support and now waiting for a response.

[LarisaHaster]

Thank you for keeping us updated, we appreciate that!

Did you also try to verify your organization?

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When you know what’s causing that, you’re more than welcome to share it here, so others in similar situation know what to do to get access to all the models​

[Hiva62]

Did you try to verify your organization?

No I didn’t. I wanted Support to confirm whether it was verification I needed given that the error message said ‘Add Credits to access these models’

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The workout around & fix: clicking the ‘Add credits’ option from the dropdown in the model picker (as opposed to topping up through the Billing tab manually):

Instead of taking you directly to billing, clicking this took me to a 3-step process to setup a new organization.

(Side note: I should have suspected there was something wrong with the ‘Personal’ org that was auto created & assigned when I signed up, because when I added credits manually I got an error message, but I still got charged & the credits still got applied to my account)

Through this 3-step process I created another ‘Personal’ org because I wasn’t sure why the system wasn’t picking up that I was already in an organization/project. More confusion ensued because now I had 2 orgs called ‘Personal’ and they shared settings: API Key, Allowed models, Credits, etc.

I tried hard-refresh & sign-in/out. Nothing worked. It took about 24h and then when I signed back in my new ‘Personal’ org, it correctly had all settings, including models the Chat tab, whilst my old ‘Personal’ org correctly didn’t have anything.

Everything works now. The only minor downside is that I have multiple orgs and currently OAI doesn’t provide an option to clean/close them. Support just said no further action is needed given I found this workaround … they didn’t say that this behaviour was a bug, just that “Changes to organizations or billing information may take some time to propagate across the platform.”

Thank you all for helping and being patient with me!

[Hiva62]

Ps. I could only attach 1 image above because I’m a new user, but this a pic of the error message I was referring to:

[LarisaHaster]

@Hiva62

Everything works now.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share the workaround and that it finally works for you!

Sharing it here might really help others in the same situation.

Hope you stick around here!