I want to create a personal account, completely unassociated from the one I have under my employer's organisation. I only have one phone number

The company I work for has created an organisation account and has invited us to use it, a few months back.
I have used it sparingly, linking my work email account and my phone number to it.

Now, as a hobby project, I want to develop an app and integrate ChatGPT into it. So I made a new, personal account, with my personal email and, when asked about the phone number, I used the same phone number as in the previous account.

And I now understand that, because the same phone number is associated with the account I have under my employer’s organisation , I don’t get any free credits on my personal account (not sure about what that means, technically). Since I don’t want any limitation on my personal account I’d like to change the phone number associated with the work account, but apparently that is not possible.

First of all, you should make this limitation very clear to users before asking for their phone number. Secondly, I’d like to know if I can fix this somehow. Please note I don’t want to transfer anything from one account to another. I just want the two accounts to be completely separate and, ideally, my personal account to have all the perks and benefits of any other new account, not to be limited by the fact I have another one created under my current employer’s organisation.

Please let me know if there’s something I can do to fix this issue and/or if you find my request unreasonable.

1 Like

Are you referring to a ChatGPT account or an API account?

If it’s a ChatGPT account, it seems that a phone number is not currently required.

For creating an API key on platform.openai.com, phone number verification is required only for the first time, and it seems to be unnecessary afterward.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6613520-phone-verification-faq

In your case, you might need to use a phone number in some way for SMS verification at first.

If you cannot separate the phone number linked to the organization account at your company, you might consider asking someone at your workplace who is understanding to use their phone number for verification (I believe this should be acceptable since you mentioned that you cannot separate your phone number from the workplace account).

Also, in the same help section, it is mentioned that one phone number can be used for authentication to create API keys on three accounts.

So, there is a possibility that you can use your phone number for authentication to generate API keys on platform.openai.com two more times (in this case, I think you might not be able to get the initial free credits).

I don’t think your request is unreasonable.

Please consider the following:

  1. First, try to see if you can use your phone number for authentication to generate an API key.

  2. If that doesn’t work, as mentioned above, you might consider finding a way to arrange a phone number for this purpose.

1 Like

First of all, thanks for taking the time to respond. Much appreciated.

I’m new to OpenAI, so I don’t really know what’s the difference between a ChatGPT account and API account.
Here are the facts:

  • the account I have with my work email was made for me, not by me. I got an email with the OpenAI logo and “Verify your email address” header and a green button. It came via mandrillapp.com. I should mention my employer is quite large so everything is done at scale here. I used that account to go to https://chat.openai.com and have conversations. No API keys, not integration tokens, nothing of that sort.
  • the account I made yesterday is an API account. I made it so I could get a token for an app where I want to get my feet wet by integrating an AI assistant into an app.
    When I tried to make the token it asked me about my phone and then, after I confirmed the phone it told me something about not getting free credits as the phone is already associated with another account. I have no idea what those free credits are, but apparently I’m not getting them.

If you’re saying the two accounts are different types and I shouldn’t have seen that message, then the only other option is that someone somehow managed to associate my phone with another API account, without my knowledge. It’s highly unlikely, but I guess anything is possible nowadays. I still think it’s more probable the two accounts I have are the same type of accounts (API ones!?) and that my phone number is now connected to both.

Anyway, I managed to get the token yesterday (from the personal account). I haven’t yet tried it. I barely finished the frontend prototype yesterday, now I’m working on the node server but haven’t got to the point where I could send requests. Probably later today.

I’m hoping the token will work as expected.

Kind regards, Andrei

1 Like

For what it’s worth, I’m able to log into both API (https://platform.openai.com/docs/overview) and ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com/) with each account.

1 Like

Yes, as you mentioned, it’s hard to say that they are completely separate.
I apologize for not being able to find the right words to describe the form of this count.

However, it seems that phone number verification is not required if you are only using ChatGPT.
It is necessary to verify your phone number when activating the API key.

Phone numbers are taken immediate after signup. I am not sure how this was done for and your phone provided. It sounds like this was maybe done before the introduction of teams or enterprise edition in which case its not really a bug and your company is meant to upgrade appropriately.

How did the account get made for you with your number and what about employees at the same company who already had personal accounts. If this is all correct I would just talk to your boss explaining this.

That said there are burner numbers that cost only a few bucks that work too but I can’t be accountable enough to link. Or try giving ownership of the personal account to your work account and leaving organization from personal. I know someone who did this and gets unlimited gpt-3.5-turbo