OpenAI switched to prepaid billing Friday

15 points by gregatragenet3 2 years ago | 7 comments

I and other users got the following email from OpenAI mid-day-Friday - they've changed the billing method to many accounts. Seems like interesting timing considering the other big happenings on Friday.

"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."

The 'help' page they link to in the email https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8264644-what-is-prepaid-billing is out-of-date (says its optional) which may indicate it was rushed out (?)

Another user posted about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312625 but it was flagged due to the link (the help text) being out of date and not saying users are now forcibly migrated to the prepaid usage.

The financial implication is this will shrink their Accounts Receivable and may temporarily increase their cash inflow.

Would love to hear from other users that got this notice what their monthly spend was; and if only 'light usage' accounts were affected.

raverbashing 2 years ago |

> this will shrink their Accounts Receivable and may temporarily increase their cash inflow.

Yeah

AR means nothing until the bill is paid

I wonder how many people are racking big bills (which is not hard to do - especially with how some "AI startup founders" behave - but I digress) and then having the payment bounce at the end of the month)

It's a safer move

n_ary 2 years ago |

Strangely, I am always adding credits and then using the API and Dall-E since the beginning.

Also, my MidJourney subscription is fixed pre-paid(i.e. they deduct the bill for next month at start of the month anyways).

Honestly, I prefer the pre-paid and credit system in general, no lock-in for when I won't be using something for a while and no risk of racking up huge bills and getting surprises at the end of the month.

mvkel 2 years ago |

This makes way more sense for accounting, consistent cash flow, and not burning up GPUs for people whose payments will decline in a month.

sigmoid10 2 years ago |

I honestly prefer this way. Next to my work I also develop stuff privately on their API and just being able to set a fixed amount of credits without worrying about something going wrong in my code and resulting in a surprise credit card charge seems pretty reasonable. For the company I work for it is not really an issue either except that someone needs to look at the budgets beforehand instead of after the fact. But I assume the extra hassle is minimal.

adventured 2 years ago | |

You can easily set a hard limit in your account to avoid that risk.

The pre-purchased credits approach burdens a lot more people than it helps, which is why it's an approach so extremely rarely used.

sigmoid10 2 years ago | | |

I have set the hard limit, but because I never know how much time I'll have in a month for developing and testing these things it's pretty high and just a worst case fail safe. Pre-purchasing credits at a fixed amount for a variable time seems better to me than vice versa. And I would say most companies are already used to that from paying licensing fees and seats for other saas.

is_true 2 years ago |

RapidApi should take notes.