Same here. I lost $600 in credits. Bought them in November 2023 as both a tax write-off and an investment, assuming I’d use them eventually. At the time, I don’t remember seeing any warning that they would expire. Maybe it was there, maybe not, but honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t need them urgently. I just figured I’d get around to using them.
What’s worse is the support. Totally useless. I’ve been trying to get in touch with them for over two months now. The replies I got were generic, AI-generated nonsense. Not just unhelpful, but in some cases completely irrelevant.
I eventually contacted them through users@openai.com, which is their official contact under the Digital Services Act (DSA). If you’re in the EU, they’re legally required to respond within a month. They didn’t.
At some point, someone named Jason Ofman from OpenAI’s legal team forwarded my message to support. That’s it. No follow-up, no resolution, and no response within the legal timeframe.
From what I understand, expiring paid credits without any form of compensation or extension is probably illegal under EU consumer protection rules. Since I couldn’t find a clear way to file a complaint through the DSA platform or a consumer watchdog, I’m going to file a small claims court case in Austria. It’s annoying and will cost a bit, but OpenAI seems clearly in the wrong, at least under EU law.
honestly, I agree with this, would be nice to have an option on the playground that tell you when you are close to expiring tokens… but then again, it goes against the profit and compute scarcity… if @sama wants to, it would be some nice positive PR or maybe not, giving that people would remember that tokens expire and would be kinda pissed… the right thing to do, is to either remove this functionality of tokens expiring or to add a customizable reminder…
Thank you for this! I am based in Austria. I have yet to find a DSA form for Austria but small claims court should work. It’s annoying because it also costs some money and the Austrian courts are very inefficient but I will go there eventually.
Created an account just to add that I was a victim of the expired credits as well. I bought a hundred dollar worth of credits in 2024. Was surprised that my api calls suddenly stopped working this year, and during a live exercise with a client. I was so sure that I had the credits, only found out they expired later. It is terrible that they do not highlight this to you, and the support is useless. I plan to switch to Grok.
I want to share my experience because I feel truly disappointed.
About a year ago, I prepaid $250 of API credits.
At the time of purchase, there was no clear warning that these credits would expire after one year.
During that year, I received no notification or reminder before expiration.
Recently, I discovered my entire balance had expired and disappeared.
When I contacted support, they admitted that my feedback about the lack of warnings is valid and promised to “share it with their team.” However, they also said nothing can be done because of the policy.
But an apology and acknowledgement do not fix the damage. The money is still gone.
This feels unfair and against good faith:
I did not subscribe to a service (subscriptions can expire).
I prepaid credits, and prepaid funds normally should not expire.
If credits expired unused, the fair solution would be to refund them or reinstate them, not to simply keep the money.
I prepaid only to support OpenAI in good faith, and instead of rewarding that, this policy punished me. I hope OpenAI will not just “acknowledge feedback” but actually change this unfair practice.
I have thought about this for a long time, indeed since this thread was started.
I have credits expiring October 1st.
The reality is though that the resulting capability I have from even a single prompt on GPT-5 is 10 times, maybe 100 times more than when I paid 1 year ago.
It is not smart to put money into a service and then forget about it for 1 year.
Or indeed to put excessive money into a service that you do not use for a year.
That is wasteful, maybe even unethical.
I am trying really hard to spend my remaining credits ethically… Sharing the results of my work with the forum (though to be fair this was my goal in the first place).
Specifically @ozkant . I get the shock of finding a system like this. Could I suggest putting your experience into one thoughtful post rather than posting across multiple threads? It keeps the forum tidy and respects the other users and the volunteers who run it.
I just feel personally, on reflection, the need to think from a different angle on this, to intelligently make a bad situation good.
For me the real value was probably to be Tier 4 and get access to models earlier, I think this is really the point of depositing more, the immediate need for speed and access, not long term hoarding.
Having Intelligence is not enough… It’s what you do with it that counts!
I would like OpenAI to disclose all the funds they’ve absorbed so far.
If at checkout there is not a statement about absorbing your funds on THIS DATE - OpenAI is in the wrong. Those practices may be legal, but they’re dark and offensive in my opinion.
When my debit card expires, my bank doesn’t just take all the money in the account.
This is really poor form from OpenAI. A policy like this punishes the exact people who spend time tinkering, learning, and prototyping on your platform, the same ones who will later champion it inside companies with real enterprise budgets. Because this pretty much only hurts the small developers, the tinkerers, who don’t use a ton of credits.
It makes no sense to put an expiry date on the credits. These aren’t groceries. They don’t go bad.
And yeah, it is listed in the “Service Credit Terms,” but OpenAI has at least six different “terms” documents you have to navigate. Burying such _vital_ information in some terms document instead of showing it clearly at purchase is kind of a dark pattern.
And in the terms, it’s not clear-cut obvious:
Service Credits … expire one year after the date of purchase or issuance if not used…
Right. But I was using my credits. I read this as “they will be wiped if your account is idle for a year,” because that would at least make some sense. Sure, that’s probably on me, but my imagination didn’t stretch to thinking this meant they would actually just wipe your credits for no logical reason.
I only lost $20 (not free credits), so I’m lucky compared to some of you here, but this policy shows little respect for small-time developers’ small-time money. Imagine if Venmo wiped your account clean once a year, just because: “Some of your money is too old. Yoink!”
And to add insult to injury, you don’t get an email telling you it happened. Your service just stops working, and you have to debug your way to figuring out that your account is now empty. Then debug your way to figuring out why it’s empty.
I never offered to DONATE my money to OpenAI 
When my debit card expires, my bank doesn’t just take all the money in the account.
Stop stealing and be decent. Don’t be a 
