Free tokens are being charged

Hello everyone!
I have enrolled getnofilter.com for the free tokens on February. They were working well (free tokens were free).
But since March, the free tokens are not actually free. Platform is charging me for each usage.

In case some admin whats to check, my account is PII redacted.

I can’t add more than 1 screenshot, but here you can see the usage, and I was charged 24 USD

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Here a screenshot of the charge:

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And here you can see I’m enrolled.
I’m enrolled since begining of February.

Hi @brodanoel - sending you a DM.

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I am having the same issue. @bhoover can I send you my account number?

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Testing it today, and am being charged for every token. My account is in good standing, Tier 3, and I have a positive $150 balance since last month. @bhoover is this a known bug still in effect?

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Hi everyone,

The team has identified an issue with the free tokens this evening at approx. 6:15pm Pacific. We’re investigating and working on a fix.

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My account is being cleaned out because I thought I was on free token!! How can I have my credits restated and start with free plan? How can we doble check to see if we actually are on a free plan?

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The status page has been updated with to reflect the ongoing incident: Issues with free tokens on traffic shared with OpenAI - OpenAI Status

We are rolling out a fix and will follow up soon with credits for requests that were impacted by this issue.

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Yep, whoopsy-doodle.

Bonus: OpenAI invented a system for turning your credits expiring soon into a refund expiring 2026.

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I have the same problem with my accounts (a level 5 and a level 4). Free tokens seem to be charged. Support (’ Louise’ ) has not responded since end last week despite several follow up messages asking for an update. As a result I’m also missing out on over a week free tokens since I’m not using it until this is resolved.

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@bhoover

Thanks for the update and for acknowledging the unintended credit usage - it’s appreciated.

Just wanted to flag a concerning contradiction: OpenAI Support has explicitly acknowledged the recent free token usage bug but is firmly stating that credits will NOT be issued for this incident, citing standard refund policy, even though this was clearly confirmed as an OpenAI-side issue. This directly contradicts your public statement above.

We definitely wouldn’t have spent those credits had we known they’d result in non-refundable charges. Could you please clarify whether credits will indeed be issued as previously indicated? I’m sure many developers are in the same boat and would appreciate consistent messaging here, especially since models like GPT-4.5 can quickly rack up significant costs before devs would have realized what’s happening.

Thanks again!

Hi Norman, I’m sorry about that support experience. Can you send me the message (DM) that you received so I can confirm that they’re given correct guidance?

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But to be clear, we do intend to follow up with credits for requests that were impacted by this issue!

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@bhoover ,

I sent you a DM with some details, but I wanted to publicly thank you for your quick responses and reassurance about the intentions regarding credits! We really appreciate your help for the dev community!

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It seems that responses from the OpenAI support bot (or contractor employing AI) usually default to denying requests. In other words, the bot often gives whatever answers would mean no further action is needed from OpenAI.

In fact, I’ve had to reply to several forum posts by explaining that the support bot’s response was completely incorrect.

When can we start using the free credits again, right now my credits are negative and do not know if we can start using this again

It’s working right now, but you need a positive balance or API calls will be rejected.

Right, i contacted support and the bot gave me a bullshit answer about how api usuage cant be refunded. Didn’t even bother to address or read my email. The worst customer service i have ever experienced.

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if they refund my credit then it will be positive. Are they doing that?