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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

I also am using OpenRouter because OpenAI isn't a great fit for me. I also stopped using OpenAI because they expire your API credits even if you don't use them. Yeah, it's only $10, but I'm not spending another dime with them.

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Hi - I'm the COO of OpenRouter. In practice we don't expire the credits, but have to reserve the right to, or else we have a uncapped liability literally forever. Can't operate that way :) Everyone who issues credits on a platform has to have some way of expiring them. It's not a profit center for us, or part of our P&L; just a protection we have to have.

If you're worried about the unlimited liability, how about you refund the credits instead of expiring them?

From my experience with billing systems it is usually not possible to refund a transaction after 6 or 12 months.

even possible with a some of them, but even in that case they're usually not "refunding" as much as they're just "making a new transaction for the same anount the other way" which does the same at the surface until reversals, voids or rejections happen and it all becomes a mess.

Seems like a weird question to ask OpenRouter Inc, a for-profit company.

Really a shame OpenAI left their non-profit (and open) roots, could have been something different but nope, the machine ate them whole.

Why is it a bad thing to ask for a company to do right by their paid customers? This type of policy absolutely causes the company to lose more business in the future because it shows customers that they don't care about customers.

I never heard of OpenRouter prior to this thread, but will now never use them and advocate they never be used either.

A fair refund policy is not in conflict with a company being for-profit. I (and it seems many others) would be much less inclined to buy credits from a company that will expire them if I don't use it, and more inclined to buy credits from a service that will refund them if I end up not using it. Once I've bought them I'm more likely to use them. And in addition to reducing that purchasing friction and gaining market share, they can get the time-value of the money between when I bought the credits and when they eventually refund them.

Enlightened self-interest is when you realize that you win by being good to your customers, instead of treating customer service like a zero-sum game.

Pretty sure OP was talking about OpenAI expiring their credits (just had mine expire).

Btw, unsurprisingly, the time for expiry appears to be in UTC in case anyone else is in the situation of trying to spend down their credits before they disappear.

Out of curiosity, what makes you different from a retailer or restaurant that has the same problem?

Why only 365 days? Would be way fairer and still ok for you (if it's such a big issue) to expire them after 5 years.

I wonder if they do this everywhere, in certain jurisdictions this is illegal.

then you shouldn’t use OpenRouter. ToS: 4.2 Credit Expiration; Auto Recharge OpenRouter reserves the right to expire unused credits three hundred sixty-five (365) days after purchase

That is so sleezy.

After how long do they expire?

IIRC, 1 year

Same for anthropic

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