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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

> First off, you’ll need an OpenAI API key. You can get this by going here and signing up.

Note that you'll also need to be from a Western country, or at least have access to both a phone number from one and a VPN. And if you want a plus subscription, you'll also need a US credit card - not stated anywhere but I've been totally unable to sign up for plus with either Irish or Belgium cards, it just immediately flashes "card declined" every time with no further info. There's about a 0.1s delay between clicking the pay button and getting that message so it's not querying my bank.

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I don't have a US credit card and a plus subscription I haven't had any issues.

FWIW I am using a UK debit card. It's hard to believe they would have reason to block cards from Belgium or Ireland.

If you search around online there's loads of people with various EU cards and the same problem.

Signed up and subscribe with spanish card without any issues.

I signed up with no problem using a Canadian credit card

Used an Irish card about 12 hrs ago, no problem.

Ok thanks, I'll give it another try. I've tried multiple times over the past week though and it's been the same each time.

I used a UK card and it worked first time.

Why are you trying to pay for it? Let procurement at your company figure it out. You wouldn’t pay for your IDE or any other tools, would you? The business should be paying for any tools they want me to use.

Plenty of people work as contractors/consultants where payroll pays them as a separate company. In fact you are probably much more likely to have something closer to a FAANG income working as contractor rather than as an employee.

Yes, I would - these tools are massive time savers, and if I suspect it'll soon become a situation where if you don't use these tools, you're going to get left behind.

If my org wouldn't pay for them, I would start looking for other jobs (unless your in an industry that can't use them like national security, etc), but I'm not going to let $30/mo stop me from using a tool that significantly improves my work just because of a middle manager.

Also, many programmers I know bring their own keyboards.. Chefs often bring their own knives, or mechanics with their own tool chests. Ownership of your own tools is powerful.

Oh, my sweet, innocent child.

Have you ever tried getting a company to fund a developer tool? More often than not, it's like pulling teeth, even if the service in question is a paltry $20 a month.

I've learned to pay for things like OpenAI myself because it's not worth the hassle to get a company to pay for it (for the purpose of R&D).

That's absolutely not a global truth, nor should it be.

I’ve been I’m working professionally in the industry for 23 years. I’ve never had a company refuse to purchase any tool I say I want or need. I wouldn’t work for any company that would. My hourly rate is way higher than the cost of any tool. It is ridiculous to not buy tools that might make me more efficient.

When that tool is a 3rd party which takes proprietary code as an input surely you can understand pushback from big software, financial services etc companies?

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