Welcome to the community!
That unfortunately doesn’t mean that.
OpenAI used to give out a bunch of credits, and that usage limit just means that even if you had more than 100$ in credits, you could only spend 100$ every month.
OpenAI’s currently not giving free credits to new accounts as far as I’m aware.
sorry
That said, if you want to get started with prompting, the free version of ChatGPT is a pretty good resource. And if you do want to develop, the $5 in credits might be a good investment. Just note, that in some countries these credits may expire after a year. Yeah, it’s not optimal.
Just note - EVERYWHERE, including where seemingly in contravention of a jurisdiction’s laws about value accounts. I do not find evidence otherwise.
The bold #4 in the current “service credit” terms:
https://openai.com/policies/service-credit-terms/
Read the “expiry and refunds”:
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8264778-what-is-prepaid-billing
Read the “please note”:
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8264644-how-can-i-set-up-prepaid-billing
Not going to extend expiration for you (breakage is built-in):
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9047769-can-you-extend-my-credits
Yet, indeed, you must prepurchase those credits to enable any current or future use of the API funded by them, at future price and future service levels and future terms you agree to by simply continuing to use the service (like the last changes to terms). So think: funding short-term usage, enough to simply not go negative.
You will have to make a second payment after a week wait to bring the total paid to $50+ (Tier 2) to simply get token-per-minute limits on models like gpt-4o increased, to even send one request with over 30k tokens of its 125k context length without immediate error.
Second hand anecdotal evidence of some exceptions being made
I agree that it’s still safer to assume that it’s unlikely you’ll get them back.
Thank you, but it seems I got error that said I run out Quotas or not have access to the models. I never touch the API before. So how do I fix this?
They instantly went up from absolutely not trustworthy to a holy entity in my personal world view.
Did you put some money into your account?
Nope, I don’t put any money or add billing method
Well, you have to do that then I suppose. The tier “free” is kind of missleading but aligns with openai’s general naming strategies haha…
Owh okay… Happy new year 2025. Hope your family doing well!
Same to you. Enjoy the celebration.