Hi all –
I attended the OpenAI Dev Day back in November. I was glad to receive those credits and confirmed after the conference that I did indeed receive them. The credits were correctly credited to my account.
However, I logged into my account today and they may have expired or disappeared? Do those credits expire?
Or is it likely the new account/organization changes I just am not looking in the right spot? I logged in like normal and still see an organization ID.
Oh shoot. I did some clicking and found this. Apparently they do expire. I wasn’t aware they expired. Oh well. Keeping this post up in case it helps other attendees.
Kind of a shame because I actually just got the research approved that I was going to go use those credits for 
Sorry to hear about your loss and thanks for sharing the screenshot with the explanation!
All prepaid credits that have been purchased expire after one year. This is the normal case for everybody who didn’t get any free credits.
I think OpenAI can improve here and send a reminder email some time in advance before the credits expire.
Adding the Feedback tag so that this will hopefully get noticed by the Developer Relationship team.
Thanks. It happens.
I guess free credits expire within 6 months.
That kind of warning email would be a really nice to have, even an email just saying “Hey your credits are gone” would be nice too.
Linking this also in case this helps other attendees who were researchers:.
I’m going to go apply for research credits here: https://openai.com/form/researcher-access-program/
Or better, I don’t think it is fair to expire paid credits. If I essentially make an advance payment for future services it should not expire. Even if it would expire 1 yr seems like a very short period.
it’s not that different from other things in life. If you buy a gift voucher from a store, it also typically has an expiry date. I think it’s just normal business practice.
Plus, it’s under your full control: if you are uncertain about your use of credits, just buy less in advance. 
You are correct, there are some consumer cases like gift cards. But, we already know the providers will receive unfair benefits because so many are not used.
I can’t think of any business case where the prepayment expire. I still have some prepayments from 5+ yrs ago at a media agency we just actived.
If it were such simple to not buy extra, then expiration would not matter.
Yes, it is better for businesses if their credits don’t expire.
Yes, this is also common practice for B2B service contracts.
I’d expect everybody will be happy if compute is so cheap and so abundant that we can get the service cheaper and without additional restrictions.
I don’t know what else to say about this particular topic.