The thing that made me mad was I actually spent money to buy additional credits thinking it was going to get me to Tier 3 but it didn’t. Not only did it not get me to Tier 3 but I couldn’t even use the credits I bought. The $500/month limit is a hard limit. You could buy $5,000 worth of credits and they will sit there for 6 months without you being able to use them.
So be warned… don’t buy additional credits for an account with free credits because you’re not going to be able to use them.
Is this probably just a bug in their billing system? yep
Can you get anyone at OpenAI to recognize that bugs like this exist? Nope