We are currently preparing for a production launch that will involve simultaneous usage by up to 500 users, each processing multiple PDF files through the OpenAI API (GPT-4.1). Based on our expected token consumption (approximately 6000–8000 tokens per file, with 3 files per user), we anticipate exceeding the capacity limits of Tier 1.
Given the scale and urgency of our testing and deployment plans, we would like to request direct access to Tier 5 or a similarly high-throughput capacity level without waiting for gradual tier progression.
Please let us know the next steps required to enable this tier increase, or if we should coordinate with your enterprise team for further onboarding.
To obtain Tier 5 you must meet the following criteria
So, it must be at least 30 days since your first successful account payment and you must have deposited more than $1000 into your API account.
If you have had your account active and paid for some time, then this will simply be a matter of adding the additional funds required and the upgrade will be automatic (usually within 24 hours)
Unfortunately, my account currently limits me to a maximum deposit of $86 per transaction (screenshot attached). Because of this, I’m unable to add the full $1000 required to trigger the Tier 5 upgrade in a single payment or within a short time frame.
Could you please advise if there’s a way to raise this per-transaction limit, or if multiple smaller deposits can still count toward the $1000 threshold for tier evaluation?
If you have an enterprise company, you can try to contact OpenAI Team. For this, on API Reference page left bottom click on Help and use chat widget to send message to OpenAI Team.
Ahh, that does seem to be a catch 22 situation. My colleage @vb has raised this with OpenAI and I have added the escalation tag to this thread. Thanks for taking the time to highlight this!
The maximum spend per month is also the maximum credit balance. It is only an issue if you make an initial maximum payment of $100 - then you must spend down the account balance in order to make another payment. Pay $50 and receive a tier upgrade now if >7 days. Then up to a $500 payment becomes possible.
The whole point of the tier (trust) system is to prevent rapid fraud from happening. Thus, an account must “age”.
Here’s the most rapid plan:
Day 0: Pay $6 (simply to distinguish that from the $5 auth test) → Tier 1
Day 7: Pay $45 → Tier 2 (total paid $51)
Day 14: Pay $200 → Tier 4 (total paid $251)
Day 31: Pay $750 → Tier 5 (total paid $1001)
You would time your payments to always be 24hr+ days. If you don’t receive the upgrade because of attempts to upgrade too rapidly, you can pay $5 more the next day for a recalculation. Then of course, feed in more unrefundable money to receive expiring credits to actually fund any usage (you don’t need to make usage).
Hello! Thanks for reaching out. Higher usage tiers (including Tier 5) are typically granted based on verified billing history and demonstrated need. Please make sure your organization is verified and share your expected peak throughput (tokens/min and requests/min) with Support (help.openai.com). We’ll review and let you know if we can raise your limits or if a different provisioning option (e.g., Scale Tier) is a better fit for load testing. In the meantime, ramp traffic gradually to avoid sudden spikes that might trigger rate limiting.
Is that now a policy, “have your personal government ID and face scanned by a third-party provider and hope it works if you want any special consideration”?
Verification is blocked for 90 days on an additional org anyway.
How about instead, “we’ll look at your other trusted tier-5 org and be able to extend those benefits to the same party on a different org.” (oops, that’s for the case of needing a second org increased, a different topic on the forum with similar need).
Thanks everyone for the insights and suggestions — much appreciated.
We’ll proceed with gradually increasing payments on our project org to meet the Tier 5 threshold. It’s not ideal given the per-transaction cap, but we’ll follow the suggested timeline and try to reach the $1000 deposit requirement as quickly as possible.
As I understand it, the Tier 5 plan is designed for high-volume production use. Typically, there’s a minimum monthly commitment (often in the low- to mid-five-figure range) to qualify—this unlocks priority throughput, higher rate limits, and more stable quotas.
That is incorrect. Once you have met the requirement of having paid a past amount in total and been upgraded, it is permanent.
It is not a “plan”, it is more an “unlocking”. OpenAI has only recently made certain models locked behind “tier” or “verification”, and before that, placed the ridiculously low rate limits that can’t even make a single large API request on those that have paid in but not paid large amounts.
