Openai api credits grant isssue can i still use those free credits which are still available

The $18 is an API trial credit that expired three months after you created an account - it was created and destroyed three years ago, even if it was, from your perspective, just a ChatGPT login that you created.

What you are seeing is the payment platform being extremely screwed up and untrustworthy, the same symptoms on my own organization and others:

• Newer credit expiration dates being applied to older credit items, not merely a UI bug but an issue in the returned data from the payments API backend;
• Payments being consumed from out-of-order of the earliest expiration, so that payments expire while being skipped over;
• Payments of credits being completely ignored for either paying for services or for adding to the shown credit balance.

This has been ongoing for months with no resolution and with nobody at OpenAI even addressing it system-wide.

News of “changes” I see: one credit that that was showing a wrong expiration date for months now has the correct expiration date - but only with the balance zeroed out against it in the interim. Even in the usage page, the “total spend” for month-to-date and the “March budget” usage are different amounts.

It seems you also have: “Expired” reverting to “Available” for this old credit.

Be glad if you don’t have (or check for) the worse symptom possible, since it seems this trial credit is showing an unremoved $18/$18 when it is expected to show $0/18: $18 of an old expired credit acting like you actually OWE OpenAI $18 and making your balance go -18 and causing a bill invoice that if not paid would shut off the account.

Negative balance despite no API usage

At the beginning, it was $0.00. After I added $10, it displayed a $10 balance. And then I was able to test it. After couple of days transformed to -$8

You are wise to only have put in the $5 at the time, meeting the criteria, “don’t pay more than you can afford to lose (or have taken from you)”.

If you are real lucky: the $18 is made working again through OpenAI fault.