TL;DR: Try switching up your IP address (e.g., try using mobile data)
I tried to top up my API account today, and received the dreaded “Card Declined” message.
I browsed through the forum and through reddit, and one of the suggestions was to “just try again”. So I did. Eventually I also got this message:
And the browser console showed a bunch of 402s from stripe
If you google stripe 402, a top result would indicate that the card number might be wrong. The card number wasn’t wrong.
What was also curious was that I couldn’t even add a payment method. For adding a payment method, I got the same “card declined” message. I’m not super familiar with stripe, but that would hint to me that their validation service wasn’t reachable or willing to respond either.
(but this particular error could be unrelated)
I contacted support, and they were wholly unhelpful. After waiting for half an hour, I got two GPT generated messages within 1 second of each other.
The gist of it was this:
“We don’t know what went wrong in a transaction last year, so it must be your bank’s fault, talk to your bank”
(I just realized now that it says 2024, must be a hallucination)
I tried to push back on that, but didn’t get a timely response. I thought I’d just try later, perhaps there might be real people available if you push hard enough at a different time.
I considered that a VPN might hamper things, so I explicitly had VPN off. Maybe it was a cookie issue, so I tried a wholly different device. Didn’t work on my phone either, same card declined.
Sounds like it might be a card issue, right? Bank says everything’s fine.
I eventually had the idea of trying mobile data. That worked.
In retrospect, it’s almost as if not using a VPN was the issue. Since IP addresses are often rotated on a quite frequent basis depending on your provider, it’s possible that you might inherit one from a local bot farm.
So in summary, if you’re fairly certain that your card’s in working order, that you’re from a serviced country, and everything else is above board, that “card declined” might simply mean that stripe is actually refusing to service your IP address. While I wouldn’t recommend rotating through your VPN catalogue until something works, it almost looks like that may become necessary if things continue the way they are now. And I understand that OpenAI can’t recommend that as a solution either.
Perhaps OpenAI could consider adding more helpful error messages, and not resort to blaming the bank (or the user’s bank account) for a network issue.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk!