The Quickstart before OpenAI’s Quickstart
Welcome to the OpenAI Developer Community, a site for connecting with fellow AI enthusiasts and consumers of API-based AI products.
You are probably not here as your first stop in learning or for pre-sales questions, but instead, you might have found the developer site only after encountering challenges in getting started on the API. I mean to collect and clarify all the information you’d want to know about the API… the preface that should come before even considering your first API call.
I aim to solve your problem when the problem is understanding, and also to give you the heads up of many caveats that you must consider before proceeding on the API. This is my unofficial, “things OpenAI should document officially”.
What you need to know
1. The API is separate from ChatGPT, and is not a consumer service.
The API is based on the concept of an ‘organization’, not a login account. While you may be logging into platform.openai.com with your OpenAI account, a login that you created previously for ChatGPT, all billing, rights and usage are a separate container called an “organization”. You’ll have your own organization pre-created, but you can also be invited to be a member in another or can invite others. You should treat an organization as your own though, you as “owner”, as this mechanism has many caveats that need understanding before you’d invite others.
2. The API is a pay-per-use service.
The use of AI models is not a subscription plan. Usage is billed based on a per-model cost, and deducted from a credit balance by the amount of tokenized data as input and output that you use. There are additional tool invocations that have fees billed per instantiation, and data storage recurring costs. Review the pricing here to understand what you will be paying.
3. API is an Application Programming Interface
You should not use the API simply as a different way to have personal consumer chats in ‘playground’ (a UI for experimenting with use-case ideas). You should have a plan in mind of how you would deploy AI services and call the API over the network, as the API service is aligned with servicing and deploying products to many clients and making programmatic scaled use of AI.
4. The API requires prepayment
You must fund an organization with an initial payment ahead of time, purchasing a credit balance that can pay for the services you consume. There is no post-paid billing (not without an Enterprise contract, for very high volume partners) . You might jump in and try to make API calls with an API key, but you would get “Status 429: check your plan and billing details”, because your account is not actually turned on: a funded organization is required.
Getting Set Up
Reviewed pricing? Think you would pay for services? Here’s what you need to know, where you might be hung up, and really, what you should closely review and understand before committing funds into the service.
1. Use a reliable email login to sign up and sign in
You must have signed up with an email address or authentication method that you will have permanent persistent control of for the life of the account or your own life.
- OpenAI provides no mechanism to change the login and authentication mechanism, and frequency sends email challenge codes to log in, as frequently as once a week, and on any new device. That means: do not use an employer’s provided email address, a domain you don’t control. Do not use an email address from a service that can cancel you or a cloud email provider that can discontinue their service or disconnect your authentication email or login for unrelated policy reasons. If you were using ChatGPT with such a transient method, I would highly encourage you login and authenticate instead with an email/password combination that you will forever be in control of, and as permanent a phone number as possible.
2. You must be In a supported country.
- OpenAI isn’t joking around here. Making API calls from geolocated IP services, even via cloud worker gateways, that are detected from a disallowed country, or providing services to nationals that reside in an unsupported country, can result in an organization and identity ban, instant shutoff, no refunds. Review supported API countries.
3. You must add a payment card with banking linked to your identity
- That means no gift card, prepaid card, virtual card. It must be a banking credit or debit account that can be directly resolved to your banking, identity, and country of origin. OpenAI uses exclusively Stripe as their backend payment processor, which should be transparent to you.
4. Adding a payment card will invoke a $5 preauthorization “charge”.
- This is a test that the card works. An authorization is the first part of any credit card transaction, then settled at the end of the day, however, an authorization without an actual charge will still look like a charge in your online banking, and could take a week or more to resolve and return funds - or some international banks don’t do this properly and keep the money. The most important thing: $5 after adding a card is not you buying credits.
Getting your API account verified, then funded
OpenAI has a problematic requirement now, “ID Verification”, a personal government ID must be scanned on both sides, along with a selfie video that matches, administered by a non-transparent partner with an unreliable service.
1. Many API services are gated behind this API verification requirement:
- Blocked: O3 models, gpt-image-1 image creation, GPT-5 for new accounts
- Blocked: Reasoning summaries from any reasoning model
- Blocked: Streaming during generation on GPT-5, o3, o4-mini, degrading UX
- Blocked: Fine-tuning o4-mini
- Blocked: Agent Builder
- Blocked: Sora 2 on the API
The help documentation is evasive with its phrasing “subject to verification”: you will be blocked.
- The verification service is full of failures that support will not resolve, dozens of long-running threads on the forum without resolution;
- You get only one attempt, and one verification per 90 days, and then your identity is gathered by the 3rd party “withpersona.com” regardless, with anti-consumer undisclosed retention policies and external data sources there, besides the service itself being in violation of many state and nation’s laws IMO.
Do not pay OpenAI money if you would reject this service. Do not pay money expecting the gated services, before trying verification against the high chance you fail on this service.
You still must add a payment card before you can proceed into verification.
2. Credits paid into OpenAI expire in one year, and are non-refundable
- Payments are instantly transferred to a no-value account, only for funding API services;
- The individual line items of a payment will have an expiration date;
- OpenAI will not refund any balance, whether after expiry, or whether they block your API organization and entire account on automated detection policy reasons.
Do not pay in more than you can afford to lose. Do not pay in until you are assured that you have verification-required services available to you which you intended consume.
3. Plan for Tiers when you make a payment
- OpenAI has rate limits that are initially very low for new accounts that get “Tier 1”;
- OpenAI has monthly spend limits that are initially very low, which are also the maximum balance an organization can have;
- Tier is only recalculated when and after an additional payment is made;
- Tier elevation will only be available after time has passed since the first payment;
- Tier elevation considers the total paid to OpenAI, not your usage of services.
Essentially: do not make a large first payment, especially not the maximum. You will want to make another payment after the time elapses for a tier elevation, starting at $50 cumulative paid after 7+ days.
Read about usage tiers.
Checklist
- You have an API use-case;
- Logging in with a long-term email as your OpenAI account;
- Allowed country;
- Familiarize yourself with pricing and the platform.openai.com site.
- Bank card accepted by platform site as payment method;
- ID verification successful if you want premier services;
- Prepay to purchase API credit (such as $5.55 to clearly distinguish your initial payment from the auth), wait up to a few hours for services actually to be provisioned and unlocked;
- Generate an API key, make your first API call, and/or test on the platform site’s ‘prompt playground’.
Additional
- The API use has automated safety checks against API calls, that classify usage in bulk even when there are no alerts. There are many categories of unwanted use that are not screened by the moderation endpoint (a service you can use for free to check user inputs), such as bioweapons or WMDs, child sexual material, automated distillation and extraction of information, automated judgements that also can result in a no-appeal ban. So know your client and know your material content being sent to AI models.
Hopefully that covers all the answers I’ve given dozens of times, and this post can be a destination for success in getting started on the API.