the problem was happening ever since… mid february/early march? ish but basically i had set a monthly limit of 4 dollars on my account (pay as i go) and i am nowhere near the limit. the api is giving me an error of “openai.error.RateLimitError: You exceeded your current quota” etc etc. any ideas?
That’s your limits.
Check your balance. You need to purchase Credits in advance.
429 - You exceeded your current quota, please check your plan and billing details Cause: You have run out of credits or hit your maximum monthly spend.
Solution: Buy more credits or learn how to increase your limits.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/error-codes/api-errors
when i signed up for the account it said that the payment type is pay as i go, i didnt change any configs or anything?
Check your email. They’re switching to pre-pay credits due (likely) to a lot of fraud in the past.
You should’ve gotten an email from them.
ah. thats unfortunate, ill go setup the other pay method i guess. thanks for the help!
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So wait, do we need credits to use the free usage tier? I currently have no usage and no credits (“$0.00 / $0 limit”) on my account, but the Rate Limits article indicates I should be able to get at least a handful of queries per day.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/rate-limits?context=tier-free
My organization Limits page shows that I’m currently in the Free tier.
Where in the docs does it say you have to buy credits in advance? From what I’ve read, the API would start returning errors once we’re out of credits.
The word free adds to the ambiguity here.
Free tier rate limits apply if you got any grant and hadn’t made any payment of more than $5 from your payment method.
The API isn’t free.
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Thanks. Is usage under the limits of the free tier free or do we get charged for the use of the APIs. For example, if I make a single request per day using gpt-3.5-turbo and use only 1,000 tokens each day, am I still charged?
Trying to get started with development and I’d like to be able to understand the costs of development at low volume. 
Yes. You are charged under free tier according to the pricing. The charges are deducted from your active grant credits.
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Thanks again. Gotta say that naming of the free tier is incredibly confusing, since none of it is free. Contrast that to AWS free-tier usage, where you get some small amount of resources for free.
I hope none of the other documentation is as misleading as their pricing docs. 
As soon as you have made a prepayment with a payment method, you will be “tier 1” of usage limit.
“Free tier” only makes sense when it is accompanied by the free $5 of trial credits OpenAI stopped giving out a month ago with account activation. There will still be others that have those free trial credits on their account to employ (they expire after maximum 4 months), thus the documentation remains.