First of all, I want to congratulate the excellent work that OPEN.AI has been presenting. I follow not only the products, but also news, articles, social media posts, social media comments, and so on — I follow as much as I can.
Compliments aside, I am a great admirer of free software, but I have nothing against proprietary software. On the contrary, as a Project Manager I feel firsthand the weight of the necessary aggregated costs to build a quality product or service. In fact, for me, consuming anything that is above the curve at a fair price is an investment, not an expense.
The concept of a fair price can be quite subjective, so in the hope of reducing the weight of subjectivity in the equation when considering whether a price is fair, I adopt the following metric: without any degree of formality, I make a mental analysis projecting the production cost of what I am about to consume and then compare it with the offered price. Try it — it’s a good basis to evaluate whether the price is fair or not!
Honestly, I consider OPEN.AI’s fees to be below the fair price. It is one of the few things that a customer pays for with a smile.
However, in life not everything is roses, and sometimes the cheap ends up being expensive. This is my relationship as a customer with OPEN.AI. The financial loss is relatively small, but the disappointment, the disgust, and the feeling of helplessness in the face of a predatory attitude adopted by OPEN.AI — that has no price.
Next time, just slap me in the face and take my wallet. The shock and anger will be greater but will pass more quickly than the disappointment, neglect, and victimization of capital cannibalism.
What happened was that I spent a few months of my life adding little by little — 10, 16, 12, … 25 … dollars — into my OPEN.AI account. I did this in the hope that in the future I would manage to get 10 consecutive free days in my schedule so I could dedicate my time to a deep dive into OPEN.AI. To my surprise, the long-awaited day finally arrived: 12/27/2025 is D0 and I could extend until D11.
After more than a year struggling to free up my schedule, while accumulating anxiety like a kid who receives from Santa Claus the coolest gift of the year, euphoric and needing to release all that anxiety rooted deep in my soul, I prepared a bowl of peanuts, opened a cold beer — it’s important to keep the brain temperature lower than body temperature — turned on my PC and went hands-on. With n8n I built a simple but quite useful workflow where the last step would be integrated with the OPEN.AI chat. After finishing the necessary configuration and parameterization, I proceeded to the test, executed the n8n Component Node that made a request to an OPEN.AI API, and right away I got the following return:
You exceeded your current quota, please check your plan and billing details. For more information on this error, read the docs: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/error-codes/api-errors.
That was when I discovered that for OPEN.AI my money has an expiration date. All those small deposits that, month after month, were added — as if my account were my piggy bank — for OPEN.AI are now worth nothing. OPEN.AI says my money expired and that I cannot use it on the platform. In other words, for OPEN.AI to charge customers for a service that has not yet been provided is to say that the service is prepaid. For OPEN.AI to apply all the deposited balances of all its customers, summing up all the money, to obtain dividends without any capital return to the depositors, is a business opportunity. But for OPEN.AI, earning 100% of the yield on customers’ capital is not enough, so they decree that the money deposited by customers is no longer the customers’ — the money now belongs to OPEN.AI. At best, the customer has the right to post a few tokens. Thus OPEN.AI earns 100% of the investment of your money, and why not earn 100% of your money itself?
Note: Is the deposited money, which will not be spent consuming OPEN.AI services and has an expiration date, eligible for redemption?
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Simply it is the business trying to limit its long term liabilities.
Have you contacted support to argue your case? This forum cannot reimburse you.
You will see dozens of similar topics if you search on “expired credits”
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Thanks for answering my questions.
Regarding the support, not yet. I’ll contact support and also read more topics.
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