You've reached your usage limit

API
1

Hi,
I have never used this API. I am an user of CHATGPT since nearly it’s creation. I am getting this odd message.

I seen on an youtube video saying it is because of you have an old account then you are not allowed to use as free user, and you have to provide billing information(credit card), to use it…

Is this correct? Because, again, I have never used it and no one used my account. I have used only on chat gpt

You’ve reached your usage limit. See your [usage dashboard]and [billing]
[settings] for more details. If you have further questions, please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

2

There is no free use of the API. The model usage is charged per https://openai.com/api/pricing/

It is easy to misunderstand the state of your API account, because OpenAI previously offered free trial grant credits that were automatically added to your account, and which expired after three months. If you made an OpenAI account for using ChatGPT, you might not have even known the API existed and that you had some credits, now expired.

So you are correct. To make use of the API for programmatic model access, you’ll need to be able to pay for the usage by purchasing an account credit first. Here’s where you can add a payment method and purchase that credit, starting at $5.

https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/billing/overview

The program to give free trial credits has been discontinued.

1 Like
3

This is messed up, since chat gpt is free and you cannot even test simple prompts? Wtf

4

ChatGPT is also an end-user product, with an enticement to upgrade to a monthly subscription within the free version.

1 Like
5

So in the Billing section it say’s “free trial”. What is actually included in this “trial”? As far as i noticed, I won’t get a single response from the lowest gpt3.5 chat model.

6

As above:

So included is nothing. At this point, “free trial” showing in some places is just a rate limit tier for those that have paid nothing.

7

Yeah I agree gutto88 its messed up and very confusing

8

it’s not messed up. pay for the damn product.

1 Like
10

In my case, I’m consistently a paying user—often spending over $100 a day—and I’m fine with that. However, I keep hitting usage limits that are difficult to identify and resolve. For example, one time a script I set on a cron job accidentally ran every minute for about 30 minutes, which quickly consumed my budget and triggered a usage cap. I’m not sure if it was token-related or cost-related, but despite having plenty of funds in my account, that didn’t seem to help.

It’s now been two days with no activity, and my access still hasn’t reset. I’m using my API across three different apps that are all in active development, so being locked out for days is extremely disruptive. There were no warnings, no errors shown in my OpenAI dashboard, and no clarity on which specific limit I hit—whether token-based, budget, or something else—or how to restore service.

At this point, I have an account with available funds that I still can’t use. I’m on Tier 4, but it’s hard to scale to higher tiers when my access keeps getting interrupted due to unclear limits.

11

Turns out, it was a self induced limit within the dashboard that was mistakenly set, creating a hard stop on my API usage once that limit had been met.