$1,060 in Prepaid API Credits Expired Without a Single Notification
OpenAI Developer Community
March 27, 2026
Thank you, I hope for that too!
I just went through my entire OpenAI platform dashboard trying to find where expiration information is even displayed. Here’s what I found.
Support told me (exact quote): “Customers are responsible for monitoring their credit balance and expiration information through their account billing or usage dashboard.”
So I checked every page:
1. Billing Overview - Shows my balance ($0.00). No expiration dates anywhere. No warnings.
2. Billing History - Shows my 5 paid invoices totaling $1,061. All marked “Paid.” No expiration information of any kind.
3. Usage Dashboard - Shows usage charts. No expiration information.
None of those pages - show expiration dates.
The only place expiration dates appear is a separate tab called “Credit Grants.”
Think about that name for a second. A “grant” implies something given for free - a promotional credit, a coupon, not something that you purchase with your money. Why would I check a page called “Credit Grants” to monitor money I paid for? Every other page calls them “credits” or “credit balance”. Its the one page with the critical expiration info uses a different term.
So when support says customers should “monitor their credit balance through the billing or usage dashboard” those pages literally don’t have the information they’re referring to.
Discussion in the ATmosphere