I just received an email (literally, in the past 15 minutes) stating that my account had been switched over to pre-paid billing. Not was going to be switched over. Had been switched over. It was the first notice I had received of the change.
Now, I already have pre-paid for my production API account. It’s a PITA. But whatever. If OpenAI wants to turn my accounting into a micro-transaction nightmare, that’s their prerogative. Seems like an odd thing to be doing when they are getting actual competition for the first time ever. But that’s not the point.
The problem is that my dev API account was switched over in the middle of the billing cycle, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY, resulting in a negative balance. Can you imagine if this had been the production account? API access just shuts off in the middle of the day because OpenAI decided to change the billing structure in the middle of the day without warning?
And today, I got an email saying this change would happen on March 25. Tell me again why I should be using GPT-4 instead of one of the other commercial API’s from companies that know how to bill customers?
Because other commercial APIs also use prepaid credits…
Anthropic:
Monthly billing there is a tier of company prequalification that you’d get your own support and sales contact.
Mistral AI:
You have threshold billing, along with prepayments, where you get a bill not monthly, but whenever you reach their criteria.
Which means I won’t get switched in the middle of the month, and then get notified of it afterward, and told it was happening after that…
Not a fan.
PS- The real cost of $5 credit is actually $5.39 (no warning ahead of time).
This is kind of crazy, but my guess is, people are running up huge tabs and not paying. We should be able to set up something to refresh the account automatically up to $X dollars.
I also received the email that will be changed on March 25th; It’s a big mistake on Openai’s part and it’s bad for my business and apparently there’s no point in being TIER 5
I’m not entirely ruling out the possibility that I might be missing something.
However, to the best of my knowledge, OpenAI is the only LLM service provider that insists on a prepaid system. Take Microsoft Azure for instance, it doesn’t employ a prepaid system at all, and if you hold a Microsoft Azure account, it operates on a monthly billing basis.
This might just be my case, but both Anthropic and Mistral also operate on a monthly billing system.
I don’t believe the current tier system holds any significance.
Agreed! Make it an easier UI experience, because after I paid $25 to “top up” for the next month or two, I noticed that even after F5 Refresh it still wasn’t obvious right on that same page what my new “credit grants” balance was – I had to go to the Usage page [ https://platform.openai.com/usage ] to see it. 
Also, WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH those credits that I just bought showing an “EXPIRES” date?
How can a business take my actual Real Money, but then set it to “expire” if unused after 12 months? SERIOUSLY!?