[CRITICAL BILLING BUG] $563.88 debt accrued on a $5 Prepaid Account - Hard Limit Failure

Hi everyone,

I’m reaching out to the community to report a critical failure in OpenAI’s billing synchronization and “Hard Limit” enforcement for prepaid accounts. As a software engineer, I rely on these limits to manage financial risk, but my experience shows they can fail catastrophically.

The Situation: I have a strictly prepaid account with a $5.00 credit limit. I was running an automated agent (OpenClaw) on a VPS. During a synchronization lag, my account balance was exhausted, but instead of a “Hard Stop,” the billing engine continued to accrue charges.

The Data:

• Total Overage: -$563.88 (on a $5 limit — an 11,000% overage).

• Total Tokens Billed: Over 23,000,000 tokens were registered in the Activity CSV after the account was empty.

• API Response: My server logs prove the API was returning 429 “Quota Exceeded” errors during this period.

• Evidence: I have the full Activity CSV and specific Request IDs

The Support Response (The Alarming Part): After contacting support, I was told by a representative that:

“Prepaid credits are applied toward usage but do not always function as an immediate hard stop in real time… usage may still be processed before the system fully enforces quota restrictions.”

This is a major concern for any developer. If a “Hard Limit” on a prepaid account isn’t actually “Hard,” then the financial risk for developers is uncapped. Charging a user for 23 million tokens while the API is simultaneously denying service (429 errors) because of internal system latency is not a valid billing practice.

Has anyone else experienced this? I’m looking for advice on how to get this escalated to someone who understands the backend mismatch between the API gateway and the billing engine. It is unacceptable to be held liable for over $560 in debt on a $5 prepaid account due to OpenAI’s internal synchronization lag.