The problem:
I have a -$8 prepaid balance and it should be $10.
The timeline:
Question: What should I do? Am I missing something?
Have you clicked near “Why is my balance negative?” ? 
“You may temporarily exceed your credit balance due to billing delays. This will show as a negative balance and will be subtracted from your next credit purchase. Learn more”
As I mentioned, I was able to make some calls, so I presume the billing went through. I only made a penny’s worth of calls, so I definitely didn’t exceed my limit. Is there somewhere else I should check?
It also depends on what kind of API calls you ran. I believe some tool uses may not count towards token usage but will count towards general usage on your billing report.
It was straight-up GPT-4o-mini test prompts for generating some simple text.
Simple text calls: prompt → response. Nothing fancy.
By my simple mathematics your balance should still be $10 - you’ve made four calls that would cost a fraction of a cent. Write to OpenAI and ask - I’ve been reading through multiple threads, and there is a disturbing theme emerging.
Balances can go negative before total shut-off.
Your test prompts were sent where, and using what software that you found? What external service or code could have been completely designed for stealing API keys? You say “no account keys compromised”…right in the face of the symptom of key compromise.
In the platform site, click “group by” → “line item” and you will see the AI model used. There’s more granular time if you go to “chat completions” (or whatever usage type is seen).
Regardless, revoke the key so it isn’t being constantly tested for when you top up again, and secure your account.
There was no software other than my simple Python script.
I used the official Python library from GIT.
And I coded the script myself. (20y exp SI, it is not complicated to hand-write simple script from an example)
OpenAI tells me that there was NO API traffic other than those simple calls.
There was no GIT, no Cloud, my code (with API key) was not transmitted anywhere. The key was used locally for 10 minutes, for 4 simple text-based tests to check the connection. Then I logged off and turned off the machine. Machine itself was not capable of making 18$ worth of loop calls.
Really… The key was not compromised, the script was too simple to fail in that way. That is not it.
There was another organization recently that had the usage site simply unavailable from corruption of some kind reported here.
What I would do:
Click “gear” icon for organization overview. Look at billing from the left bar and then tab called “credit grants”, and see the amount of each payment there, and the balance remaining of the credit grant. You should have a figure such as $9.99/$10.00, if not the same numbers, which is a different report of your remaining funds.
Can you make an API call still against your available credit grant balance? If so, your negative credit amount as total is likely in error. To have any investigation taken and this issue doesn’t fix itself (and isn’t merely appearance), you’ll need to send a message via help.openai.com - and they made it so it takes multiple convincing messages to get a human to take a look, you have to explain what when wrong without ambiguity or other conclusion than org database or payment backend issue that openai can fix.
Hi @OceanDudao, thank you and fellow community members for investigating this. I reached out to you directly!
For the archive and people who have a similar issue:
I did two things concurrently:
1:
I wrote to support (the strange and not-willing-to-escalate-the-issue AI was convinced that it needed to. I don’t know if it actually did.)
As an AI support agent, I’ve escalated your issue to a support specialist for review. I don’t have the ability to provide a confirmation or proof beyond this message, but your case is now in the queue for investigation by a support specialist with access to your account details. They will follow up with you directly regarding your billing issue.
2:
Secondly, I wrote a question here.
I don’t know which one escalated the issue.
Responses:
I think you are right. There was an amount of $18, and the math is somewhat clear but not very logical.
$10 - $18 = -$8
But why? Did the system just assume that those $18 were a debt of some kind?
Thank you for the response! I’m happy that there is a line of communication! You added $10 to my account, and that is awesome, but my balance is now $2, not $10. Thank you @OpenAI_Support for trying to fix the issue for me! I wrote a response email to support@openai.com that there is now an $8 issue.
-$8 + $10 = $2
Yes: there is something quite screwy going on.
Confirm: Did OpenAI actually say “we added $10 to your account”? Because if you paid, it should be there as a credit grant line item, and you don’t have two. I think you are looking at your own.
Or it could be that your payment as “invoice” went solely to paying off a virtual or imaginary partial negative balance and never reached becoming a grant. This seems mathemathically like what is going on - your expired trial is being treated like a receivable, and sucking out of your balance.
The $18.00 is the free trial credit when you initially signed up for an OpenAI service and created the login. Many did this for ChatGPT, not even knowing about the OpenAI API. It expired after three months.
Any expired amount should be “zeroed-out” in the platform billing site to be like the what OpenAI has done recently: completely hide how much prepaid balance remaining of each was “taken” - no evidence that $NNN.NN was left when OpenAI marked it expired, like my $5 API trial (OpenAI lowered the amount in 2023), or the larger grant with much more unused credit expired:
You have something different: your balance on the left side says $18 - plus it also says expired. The expired amount of the free trial is still there and seems to be counting as a negative.
So there is something wrong with that old credit grant. Did you see a $0.00 Credit balance in your organization under billing before making your first payment?
The “expected” (but unwanted) behavior for over a year is that the true payment date is hidden under credit grants, and that also people have been given until the the last day of the month as the expiration date. And that any expired amount is $0.00 balance in credit grants.
I find this screenshot from Aug 2024, with the amount of an $18.00 trial not zeroed:
There could be some kind of bug and fault in understanding with new credit balance calculation code recently introduced.
If the behavior is that unused old trials “with” a balance never removed start counting further negative instead of being ignored, it could affect more than you, a retroactive “suck even more from the balance”. That is the only possible explanation here:
Evidence of code change:
Such a bug could affect ANYONE with an old account, where 2022 trial credits showed the expired balanced remaining instead of it being cleared to $0.00.
Investigation needs to be done deeper and also by OpenAI - like we could ping @PaulBellow who may have an early “free trial” credit grant to report on its appearance - and say if any “remaining” amount recently was sucked off the top of a credit balance.
BTW: Even earlier, OpenAI showed how much they expired on you:
@OpenAI_Support action:
I confirm that OpenAI added those $10 yesterday. It was not there before.
But how was I able to use the API for test runs?
At the beginning, it was $0.00.
After I added $10, it displayed a $10 balance.
And then I was able to test it.
After couple of days transformed to -$8
Thought: Maybe it is some kind of delay? A CRON-like function that cleans up those balances (sums them up or something)? Not a good practice, to be honest. It looks like treating symptoms, not the root cause.
I would like to highlight this part of your message.
@_j Awesome post! I thank you for your time and “brain computing power” used 
@_j seconding the thank you for your time and brain computing power as always!
@OceanDudao I added more credits to your account to hopefully bring you back up to a positive balance and flagged this issue to our billing team. I also replied to your Support chat directly. Let me know how everything looks!
My problem was resolved by @OpenAI_Support Thank you!
Mine are all showing $0/amount available, though they did have balances.
Hope that helps!
