Users should be able to change the email on their account. Some users sign up with work emails which they will lose access to upon entering a new job. There are other valid reasons to change the email used to sign in with chatgpt as well. [UPDATE] You can find this support under Billing support by first clicking “Other”.
Since I couldn’t change my email I had to cancel my subscription and delete my account. I tried signing up a new account but it would now allow me to verify my phone number (In use too many times).
Luckily I had another account I had signed up with before but there was no 2FA option. When a user signs up for the first time, 2FA should be available BEFORE the customer provides payment information. That would be respectful to help the customer’s privacy.
I put in my payment information anyway since I am a chatgpt slave now. But theres no bloody 2FA option still after upgrading account.
So I cancelled the subscription and tried to delete my payment information. The payment information should be removable to help the customer’s privacy. But I can’t.
So now the only way to properly protect my information (With 2FA via authenticator) is to delete my remaining account… But then I won’t have another phone number to sign up with and who wants that if there’s no 2FA option?
Thanks but the only reason I’m here is because support doesn’t care. Do you think a service that holds payment information that can’t be deleted ought to allow 2FA to be paused?? Really?
OK to be fair I see deep under Billing support… there’s a button that was introduced called “Change the email address associated with the account”. That sure would have been nice to know.
We might agree with much of what you wrote, but no one here can do anything about it.
If you just want to scream into the void, that’s fine, but posting this here does exactly as much good as scrawling out your grievances on paper, stuffing the paper into a bottle, and tossing the bottle in the nearest ocean.
The company is in the midst of some unimaginable growing pains right now. I’m sure they will get all of these issues sorted in time—probably 1–2 years. But, for now this is what we have.
At least in the near-term we know what their priorities are,
ChatGPT Enterprise
ChatGPT Business
Developing GPT-4.5/GPT-5
Bringing multimodal GPT-4 to market
The vast majority of users who signed up for ChatGPT used their personal cellphone number, their personal email, and didn’t register a MFA account.
I’m sincerely sorry this has been a frustrating experience for you, and I empathize. There’s just nothing anyone here can do.
You might try reformatting this list as discrete, concrete suggestions and submitting it through help.openai.com.
I honestly don’t think it really matters that much. Most services don’t allow you to delete all your payment information and never offered MFA at all.
Ideally, I think all services regardless of whether they hold payment information or not should require MFA, but I’m not King of the Universe yet.
Then you should absolutely post a link to where that is and a screenshot, because this is the first I’m hearing about it and that’s very important information which will be incredibly useful to many others.
It’s okay to be frustrated—communication and support from OpenAI are very often frustrating.
Forum members here are frequently filing in as front-line support, which is frustrating for us to—not because other users and developers come here for help, but because too frequently the answers aren’t clear even to those of us who have been working with the models and services everyday for months or years.
Often the best we can do is offer empathy or suggest workarounds for pain-points we’ve seen come up several times before, other times ask we can do is try to help people understand why things are what they are.
With respect to the draconian identity rules, I suspect OpenAI is terrified of the service being used in a restricted country and the scrutiny and subsequent regulation that may follow.
I understand the frustration with the 2FA. My guess (with zero evidence or inside knowledge) is they paused it because they don’t have a system or process in place to allow people to recover their accounts if they lose the ability to use their preferred 2FA method, and they may have had a run of 2FA users locked out of their accounts.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you have any questions about how to wring the most out of the models, this is one of the best places to come to for help, but for actual help with account issues, there’s just not much we can do.
