I just set up my account this morning and create a quick chat app. However, I have not received any responses other than a 429. Obviously, this is just on the Free tier. But, I haven’t had 1 successful interaction so I shouldn’t be above any limit. Is it required that I submit a payment just to get my first interaction?
I’m requesting against the gpt-3.5-turbo model. But, also tried 4.0.
Welcome to API!
It is required to add a payment method and purchase a prepaid credit, good for one year. There is no free trial credit to pay for services for over a year.
Hi, welcome to the community!
Free tier only applies if you got API credits from a promo or trial.
OpenAI no longer gives free credits just for signing up.
To use the API, you should add at least $5 or $10 credits:
https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/billing/overview
Thanks for the info. I do suggest a better error message or something on the portal that makes that clear. Its odd they would want first time users to have a bad experience.
That said, you don’t allow even a hello world app without billing set up? Do you know how many hoops a typical developer needs to go through to get funding approved? Why would I jump through them if I’m just trying to get a successful interaction. Limit it to 3. At least give me something that says I set it up right… now go set up your payment method.
Just to clarify, I’m not an OpenAI employee. I’m just a user like you, sharing what I’ve learned from using the platform.
OpenAI used to give free credits to new users, but they stopped that after some users abused the system by making multiple accounts to get extra credits. I think because of that, the rules changed and now you need to add billing before you can use the API, even for a basic “hello world” request.
I totally get how that feels like a rough first experience, especially when you’re just trying to confirm your setup works.
Also, if you’re trying to use some higher-security models like “o3” or “gpt-image-1”, you’ll need to verify your organization before you can access them.
I think a lot of developers feel the same way, and OpenAI could definitely make that first step easier.
You can open a topic under category API and Feedback subcategory, and you can give a kindly feedback your experience and request for future.
The http error message does have a body you can read. For a status 429 error, it might deliver text to you along the lines, “check your plan and billing details”.
You can code to receive these informative messages and deliver them to the user interface, which if using the RESTful API are bytes of JSON string.
Thanks for the information. I’ll likely end up doing this through Azure to get to OpenAI just because the company has Azure set up and billing established. I’m looking for easy and I’m not going to submit my own CC information for a company request.