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

Sounds like operating costs are a core issue here. Switching to a prepaid model ensures a more consistent cash flow.

Any company offering an API is going to have some percentage of their customers every month who are shocked to learn that a bug or other failure to rate-limit their own scripts has led to a bill that's 100x larger than they were expecting.

These customers are angry, call Support and Accounting to demand refunds, and cancel their service. There's no upside to having unhappy customers.

Switching to pre-paid billing is probably just better for everyone.

OpenAI's API has a $ limit you can set, which generally avoids the "100x larger than they were expecting" scenario

Then why aren't they accepting new customers