You should know by now, USE EUROPEAN!
Is there a way to at least track your credit history? We only add the minimum each time, so the loss isnāt great but I suspect even then we had half the credit remaining before it expired. Thatās some standing charge.
I suspect what we need is a registry of legal documents per country that we can use to make standard claims.
You can see when your credits will be expired from following link:
https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/billing/credit-grants
2 Likes
Where can I find an email address to send a formal request/complaint? I need to demonstrate to my bank and the consumer authority that I have attempted to recover the credits, so they can pursue my complaint and possibly challenge OpenAI legally.
My credits expired twice without me even noticing. I did not receive any notification, and I was unaware that prepaid credits can expire. It is illegal in the EU, and although time-consuming, solvable.
The chat support is now probably powered by v5, so you can imagine what responses Iām getting. It initially spoke out about a number of misleading and outright lies regarding their right to expire their credits, and then claimed it is not a legal expert when I asked for an email address.
Your help is appreciated. I just need a legitimate corporate email address for OpenAI. I donāt care if itās the receptionist or the janitor. I need to show I did make a formal request.
Your help is invaluable, and I promise to keep this post updated so that it also helps you. Much love - human developer 
2 Likes
Of course, thereās no reason for credits to expire unless malicious. To the very last, refund the money to the bank, they donāt want the burden. Easy to do since they use Stripe.
2 Likes
OpenAI does a somewhat dirty trick on you in the UI - they wipe the balance of unused credits, so you canāt see how much was expired out of the credit grant line items.
You can email support, and ask them for the same information, āhow much did you take unused from each of my expired credits, cause Iām gonna go rogue with my bankā, and they may or may not be helpful. Youāll need to write a request that a bot cannot placate you with non-answers, and tell them the org and details.
2 Likes
Iād like to thank OpenAI for being transparent on how anti-customer their practices are. Much better that I find this out early and can move to Google or Microsoft than find out later after Iāve got locked in to them.
No need to be dramatic upfront. You can avoid it by not adding more than you need to your account.
Not that I want to defend the practise. I still think itās not ok to let it expire. At least not without a clear notice a couple weeks before that happens.
In what world is this dramatic? I am wondering why this is not escalating way more. This is as if you load some money on your paypal account and they just delete it. How is there no huge outcry in the media? Maybe because it āonlyā hits developers, not the end users. You yourself were ranting about them breaking laws for services provided in Germany. I am in Austria, so it is pretty similar situation for me.
This is the most dark pattern behavior I ever encountered. No renown company I ever dealt with did anything remotely comparable. You pay for a service upfront and they just delete your money? When I tried to get answers to why my money is missing, I searched the FAQās and I could not find anything about expiring credit. Maybe it is in there somewhere, but the fact that its hard to find anything about it, and the fact that even their support chatbot needed like 5 prompts and a direct mentioning of expired credits, shows there is intent behind this. When I just explained my situation, the bot acted as if there must be something wrong with my account, or that I may have used them all etc.
And even if I get my money back, this is just straight up theft. They speculate on their users to drop the issue and accept the loss of their money. It is completely hidden, my dashboard did not mention anything about expired credit, it just disappeared. Many users, with a small amount of money in their accounts, will not even know that their money just got deleted, because there is no message at all. For most of the customer these are small amounts, but for openAI the sum of all these stolen money must be huge.
In my opinion this is a huge scam and a scandal, but maybe that is just meā¦
For Germany it is possible to get it back if you got a private account.
- write a formal complaint to OpenAI
- give them a couple weeks to react e.g. 2-3
- no refund? Write a complaint to the āVerbraucherzentraleā give them ~8 weeks to react
- go to your local court and ask them how to sue them
It takes 3 years starting after the year of last usage until you lose this right.
If you acted as a company then the 12 months in their terms & conditions is lawfully ok and you wonāt get it back.
I was using my account for private experiments - was using Azure for company usage (may have givven a business partner access too but he is also a friend.. unclear about that).
But you said something about end users.
That means you obviously acted as a company. There is no extended customer rights for companies.
In fact you are not even really a customer. More like a business partner of OpenAI. And business partners have the freedom to make such contracts.
Is this morally ok? That is not even a question. Companies are not obligated to act morally. Lawfully is pretty much what we ask for.