We had a large API usage invoice in July. When we switched over to a prepaid plan, the pending invoice was converted to negative credits.
Based on past conversations with support, they suggested simply adding credits to make the credits balance positive to restore API usage.
Currently, even though the balance is positive, API usage is still disabled due to a bug in the billing system.
Further details are in our support case: 12627391
Please take a look, as some of our critical API usage work has been blocked this week due to this issue. Thanks in advance, and we look forward to your response!
While support occasionally pops in, it’s mostly just unaffiliated developers here. The best thing you can do, I imagine, is to keep your ticket alive. They usually get to it, it’s just a titanic exercise in patience.
While this is absolutely not your fault, it’s generally a good idea to ensure you have more than one supplier - while you’re offline, it might be a good idea to get azure set up as an alternative provider for redundancy. While the guardrails are a little different, the models are indentical and and usually work as drop in replacements for most use-cases.
You’ll see an invoice there in a pending state if there is either an overage or if a charge was not initiated or not successful. You should be able to make a payment directly against the particular invoice due in the platform site with buttons for that invoice, also observing the PDF, and seeing it does not have a payment charged like the last ones.
Credit purchases are additions to an account’s credit positive balance. They will not affect past invoices, where you account can be insta-locked if an attempt to charge a monthly balance fails.
This forcing more API organizations off post-paid billing has been problem-fraught, with not a single OpenAI staff member here to communicate about the inability to pre-purchase credits before the switch - and then all the invoices went missing, which hopefully is fixed.
If you have no way to directly pay against the invoice, contact support@openai.com by email, and describe the need for immediate escalation to staff that can answer factually and take action - and a payment.
Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, I am able to add credits with our newly added payment methods and the positive credits seem to reflect the balance after paying off the unpaid invoice. However, there was no way to pay the invoice and the invoice still shows as unpaid.
Hoping @OpenAI_Support can help resolve this with our case number. The invoice amount was also a significant portion of our annual budget, so even if invoice payment is enabled and we are required to pay it, given that we already added credits, we would need to request a refund to pay the invoice separately. We have not used the recent credits added so far because API usage is disabled.
Tip: you will have to make an extremely strong case that you were told to purchase credits by support - and that advice was wrong and useless - to have any chance of having a monetary refund. “Credits are non-refundable” will be recited back to you by AI and by front-line support - and OpenAI errors even will only result in more credits.
This is a larger buggy issue it seems - any invoice posted to your account that is not accompanied by a charge to a payment method in that same bill should be directly payable in the platform site without friction.