OpenAI Switches to Prepaid Billing(help.openai.com) |
OpenAI Switches to Prepaid Billing(help.openai.com) |
> Hi there,
> We've updated the billing system for your OpenAI API account. Instead of receiving a bill at the end of the month, you'll now need to pre-purchase credits to use the API. You can add credits to your account by visiting the billing page. To learn more about prepaid billing, please see this help center article prepaid billing.
> No action is required from you at this time.
> Please note that this change only applies to your OpenAI API account and Playground. It does not affect ChatGPT Plus subscriptions.
> Best,
> The OpenAI team
"help center article prepaid billing" links to the URL that nonoesp submitted. I haven't been using the API lately, and my bill has been $0 for quite a few billing cycles. Maybe they're only doing this to light users.
Also, at least part of the debt may be because people were getting compute without paying for it in the pay-per-use model. This could explain why paid memberships are being paused too (e.g. people mass-registering and then getting chargebacks).
If you're a cloud computing provider/DC operator, inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.
At some point things still need to be competitive against existing, entrenched, optimized systems.
Updated over a week ago
Is this actually new? The article doesn't even mention anything about switching to prepaid billing.
I weep.
This is obvious if you read even the first paragraph.
Its not just that you lose revenue, but you also strain existing resources degrading service and satisfaction for other legitimate customers.