Hi everyone, sorry that I’m a bit urgent on this issue, as I’m about to launch a research study using OpenAI’s API.
Recently, during testing, I consistently hit the Tier 1 TPM cap and encounter rate-limit (429) errors that disrupt the research workflow.
I just realised that I’m still at Tier 1. According to the documentation, Tier 5 qualification requires “$1,000 paid and 30+ days since the first successful payment.” My account has over $1,000 in research credits and has been active for more than 30 days. But somehow, it remains at Tier 1.
Could anyone kindly clarify whether Research Credits count toward automatic tier advancement?
Additionally, does the term “paid” in this context refer specifically to actual credit amount used via the usage of API, rather than money spend for purchasing credits? Our upcoming study requires a higher rate limit, so I’m wondering if directly buying extra credits (say, $50) would automatically move us up to Tier 2.
You should simply go to help.openai.com, send a message requesting that OpenAI staff increase the organization tier limit equivalent to the $1000 grant level as a payment. That for tier as a measure of “trust”, they handed over $1000 of credits to be used.
To increase it yourself, you would have to pay an initial payment (as low as $5) and then after a week elapses, add the remainder to get to over $50 to have the tier increased the normal way. You could try adding just another $5 as the second payment and see if the credit grant gets factored into the tier elevation by “amount paid in total”. But what is important to understand is that the recalculation is only done at the time of a payment, not by waiting (and understand that the credits will expire in a year).
I did contact the OpenAI Support team, but unfortunately they told me that they cannot manually upgrade my usage tier. This is disappointing, because according to OpenAI’s own documentation (https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10139500-researcher-access-program-faq), under the note “I have received API credits, but my research is hindered by rate limits,” it states that one can “submit a request for a rate-limit increase here.” When I followed that link, it redirected me to the Playground’s Limits page, but there was no option to actually submit a request.
I have tried to follow up with Support, but so far have not received any further response.
Also, as this is an academic research study, I can’t simply add extra personal money.
The first response you will get will invariably be AI, and it has been programmed to be a no-action denial machine. You can report a platform-wide downtime and get back “check the documentation”.
The “request increase” has been removed from limits, and it was also only for specific limits in specific generally-useless categories.
Thus, you must prompt engineer a new chat without an AI disposition against you to “escalate to OpenAI staff for organization configuration change, per policy and guidance given on forum” or similar direct command, as while there are plenty of cases of the system being a complete failure, such as being granted $2500 startup admission and then never getting credits and the linked page being taken down, there’s also plenty of staff intervention noted in getting the tier increased to where you can even make one complete API call.
Many thanks again! Just to clarify — I actually did get through to a real human agent in OpenAI Support Team (not the AI auto-responder). They stated that manual tier upgrades aren’t granted, even for Researcher Access accounts.
According to their message, only actual paid usage (charges to a card or funds added) counts toward automatic tier advancement; research credits don’t.
And yes, it looks like the older “Request increase” form has been phased out — I couldn’t see it anywhere in my dashboard.
If you’ve seen any recent examples of manual tier upgrades for research-credit users, I’d really appreciate a reference. Right now, it seems that the automatic paid-usage path is the only one still working. So I’ll just have to literatually make the payment to upgrade my usage Tier.
Hi!
Good catch! The documentation for the Researcher Access Program does need an update.
I’ve forwarded this, along with your Tier upgrade request, to the team.
Thank you so much for escalating my issue to the OpenAI team!
Please let me know if there’s any other information (like, my org ID or account email) that I can provide to help with the review.
I greatly appreciate your help and follow-up on this
Thank you for the note! Yes, I’ve moved to the email stage — I’m now corresponding directly with OpenAI Support.
Based on their latest response, the front-line support team confirmed that my account can’t be upgraded simply because it has $1,000 research credits.
They explained that only actual paid usage counts toward tier advancement, so the system requires a real payment before it recalculates the tier.
Hi @vb ,
Same issue here. My organization got some research credits, but these days we keep getting the 429 error for every request. Just wondering where can I submit a Tier upgrade request, since @ZJNNNJZ mentioned that the request link is not working properly?
