OpenAI Switches to Prepaid Billing
help.openai.comHeadline is wrong, the link isn't t about a change but a how-to documentation page last updated “over a week ago” about how prepaid credits interact with monthly invoiced billing, and how to set up automatic prepaid billing. Monthly invoiced billing is not (from anything there) going away.
I got this email 2 hours ago:
> 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.
That's possibly legitimate news, but that's not what the page linked covers.
Wild guess, maybe OpenAI is deeply in debt and Sam Altman was hiding it (possibly committing fraud)? Because a benefit to prepaid billing is that they'll get more cash in the short term.
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).
It will improve cash flow somewhat, but nothing that major to change anything when billions of dollars are being spent.
Maybe it's more about a possible exploit where you can skip paying if you pay-as-you-go.
That is too small a thing for something like this. All big users can be taken to court to pay anyways.
But how about a hundree thousand small users?
Its not just that you lose revenue, but you also strain existing resources degrading service and satisfaction for other legitimate customers.
You're right. I doubt this is just a coincidence!
Cloud costs are already expensive, so let's change to doing normal computing tasks in an insanely inefficient manner on the cloud?
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
> Updated over a week ago
Is this actually new? The article doesn't even mention anything about switching to prepaid billing.
Flowers for Algernon denouement
It didn't switch to anything at all, that's just a new option for orgs who want to avoid the downside of monthly billing.
I weep.
This is obvious if you read even the first paragraph.