I was a happy OpenAI customer. ChatGPT Pro subscription, Codex for my daily work as a lighting designer, $379 spent on credits in July alone. This is the story of how OpenAI turned me into someone who will not give them another dollar - and documented every step of it themselves.
July 9. My Codex balance - 491.8 credits - vanished to zero. Not spent: my application logs show the balance wiped within one second, with zero usage in between. I bought 1,000 more credits ($48.40). They never appeared. OpenAI’s own support confirmed in writing my balance was “still $0” after the payment. Then Codex disappeared from my account entirely - along with my project history. Their agent spent over a day walking me through reinstalls before access returned. When it did, $12 of my purchase was already gone. Nobody has ever explained any of this.
July 14. Working against a deadline, with the service flashing “Usage limit exhausted. Add credits to continue,” I bought credits four times in 96 minutes - $193.60. Each 1,000-credit package burned out in about 40 minutes, silently consumed by re-sending the giant working context I had to rebuild after their outage destroyed my history. Not one warning about the consumption rate. Not one “your session is spending $1 per minute.” Just “pay again” - four times in one evening. The same day, their billing system produced seven voided invoices and five failed auto-charges on my account.
Then I asked one simple question: what exactly did I pay for?
Over the following weeks, OpenAI support told me my credits were “fully consumed” - and refused, five separate times in writing, to show a single record of that consumption. Their own words:
- “We don’t have visibility into that level of account activity from our support tools.” (July 16)
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- “We’re unable to provide itemized credit consumption records or usage logs.” (July 22)
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- “We’re unable to provide itemized credit consumption logs, internal ledger records, or other internal usage data.” (July 23 - and again, word for word, July 29)
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- On the one-second balance wipe: “We’re unable to provide any further analysis or internal explanations about the account behavior you described.” (July 29)
- Think about that. A company that sells prepaid usage units tells you they’re all spent, and when you ask for the receipt - any receipt - the answer is: we can’t show you, we can’t explain, case closed. My formal GDPR request for my own account records? First they pointed me to files on my own laptop. Then they invoked a two-month extension - while simultaneously refusing, in writing, to provide the very records the extension is supposedly needed to review.
- Here’s what makes this genuinely absurd: I did their homework for them. I analyzed my local session logs, token by token, and I publicly corrected my own initial claim - the July 14 credits were indeed consumed, at a rate no user could have anticipated, with no safeguards, after their outage forced the workflow that caused it. I was more honest with OpenAI about their billing than OpenAI has ever been with me.
- Restoring the credits would have cost OpenAI almost nothing - prepaid units, marginal compute cost of a few dollars. Instead they chose: five refusals, a stonewalled data request, a lost Pro subscriber, and this story.
The dispute is now with the regulators - complaint DPC0826667433 with the Irish Data Protection Commission, filed August 5 with the full documented correspondence attached. Everything above is documented - receipts, statements, the full correspondence, and a hash-verified log analysis. I’ll post updates.
If you prepay OpenAI for credits, know this: if they ever disappear, the company’s official position is that you are not entitled to know where they went.
Case refs: OpenAI support 11209139 / 11759416 / 11918653, privacy 11232032, DPC complaint DPC0826667433. All quotes verbatim from OpenAI correspondence, July 9-29, 2026.