I see many such requests in the forum, and no answer works for me (or most other people, it seems).
My account is free
I have an OpenAI key and a single project named Default Project.
I am in an allowed geography (Japan)
The usage page shows zero activity for all of November
First thing in the morning, I try the curl examples on the developers quickstart page
Invariably, the result is an error code 429, exceeded quota. This is extremely frustrating; I would really like to learn about AI in general and OpenAI in particular.
Since I see many complaints about exceeded quota for paid accounts, I am not enclined to throw dollars at the problem by upgrading my account.
go to the billing section of your account page and add a minimum of $5 USD (ÂĄ750 JPY) as a prepaid balance. this amount is consumable for token usage and expires within one year.
Thanks for the suggestion. I have two problems with this. First, why should I pay for a free trial? More importantly, I have seen others complain that their account has the same problem, although it does have credits. Therefore, I prefer to have a real solution. OpenAI billing doesn’t inspire trust.
Hey there!
If you go to your usage page, you might see something like this:
If this is the case, then your free trial must have expired, and you would need to prepay a minimum of $5 to continue.
If not, what does it show? Credits remaining? Like the image below?
There is no “free account” that can actually make API calls. Maybe it was free to merely create a login, but there are no free trial credits dispensed to use OpenAI services.
A prepurchase of API credits is indeed required to pay for OpenAI models, billed by usage.
Otherwise, that 429 error will say “check your plan and billing details” - like to add a payment method to billing details and continue with a credit purchase amount.
The link to someone giving out free API services to learn about their AI in general, to the tune of 1 million tokens per minute and 1,500 requests per day:
Thanks for your kind reply, Vaibhav, but I don’t see anything like your screenshots. If you are interested, I added a screenshot of my usage page.
Note that I am using a free trial account; it may look different from a paid-for account. I am aware that it expires after three months and it has limits; my account is a few days old, and all my attempts to submit an API request resulted in error code 429, “quota exceeded”.
Thanks, _j. Hmmm, there are forum posts indicating free APIs were silently discontinued. I am not a happy camper, because I wasted a lot of time trying to get this fixed. OpenAI should make a document available that makes it clear free accounts can’t use APIs.
Rant: Of course, OpenAI have the right to only offer paid services, but giving free access to learners is a widely used practice in the industry. I am going to talk to Sam
Thanks for the pointer to “someone”. I might go there rather than supporting OpenAI.
Not all models are available for trial accounts, as far as i know. The simplest way to find out is to go to the playground and
Try something out there to see it anything works at all (I do see a $5 balance available in the screenshot). Note what models are available in the dropdown there.
Use one of the available models for the CURL request, as the models in the documentation may not yet be available to you.
GPT-4o is available for paying customers. This is an obvious oversight from OpenAI that must be understandably bewildering to new trial users.
At this point, your choices are either to use a smaller cheaper model, or to put in $5 as a prepaid account balance.
What I can assure you is, that $5 goes a long way!!
Thanks again, Vaibhav. I am afraid that it’s not just GPT-4o that has no free trial, but any model. I think OpenAI used to offer free API access, but as of some time earlier this year, it was cancelled. Too bad.
