OpenAI says my prepaid credits were consumed, refuses to show any record
community.openai.com
community.openai.com
I’m sorry, but you’re wrong about the facts. A gift certificate is a business liability under GAAP. And you’re not required to hold that liability forever.
FASB ASC 606 (Revenue from Contracts with Customers)
What’s more, Federal Law gives you only 5 years, but states may have additional protections,
“Under the law, a gift card cannot expire until at least five years from the date it was activated. The law also places general limitations on fees. For instance, the card issuer cannot charge a dormancy or inactivity fee on a gift card unless there has been no activity for one year and the card clearly states its policy toward that fee.”
The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (Credit CARD, 2009)
https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/news/december2019.ht...
https://www.ncsl.org/financial-services/gift-cards-and-gift-...
You say that, but you haven't explained how it is a liability, and I consider it debatable. In practice, there is a near-zero risk to a large firm in a statistical sense if the firm caps the max amount held per user to say $1000 or whatever the acceptable limit is. It's not as if millions of users are suddenly going to exercise their balances all at once unless the firm is going out of business anyway.
Cloud computing firms even allow me to keep tens of thousands of dollars in my account balance, with no expiration, which helps me ensure that my cloud services will keep running for years if not decades. There is just no strong case for OpenAI expiring unused balances after one year. In my prior comment, I already named various large firms that NEVER expire gift card balances.
The reputation loss from an expired balance is vastly more consequential. Thinking solely from an accounting pov is absurd.
I gave chapter and verse.
But let me try to help with the intuition. It’s about accounting. That’s all. Not your intuition. Not my preference. Ready?
Record. It’s the agreed upon rules for how some named monetary _thing_, which is constant flow and here defined, can be said to have a value x at time t. Gift card is a liability until used when it is recognized as revenue. Period. Full stop. End recording.
All the laws, maybe your law of how long they should keep the liability, are down stream from this. Everything else is chaos and confusion.
It's your biased interpretation that it's a liability. A clever firm may use a safe fraction of it to collect interest via a bank or directly via treasuries. This turns your logic on its head. The longer the gift card stays unused, the more revenue it generates via interest. Just enough needs to be kept as cash to fund customer expenses for the next two quarters.
There’s our common ground! The common sense question: why is 1 year legal when there is a federal law saying it’s must be 5 years?
Amazon is another prominent example. It gift card in the US never expires and has no fee. It's a good place for stashing funds. Do you think Amazon doesn't have accountants?
For logical reasons I have noted before, there is no unmanageable risk to any sizable firm with it.
And an expectation that the liabilities will never be called is an offsetting asset. It never offsets to quite zero, but over time it gets pretty darn close.
Small enough amount of money that I didn't bother chasing it up, but surprising to see other people saying the same thing, maybe I will
There are two relevant laws. One controls gift cards and credits, which in California are valid for a minimum of 10 years regardless of what the company may say. Companies make a surprisingly significant amount of money on selling credits and expiring them from their balance sheet.
The second law is a requirement that they issue itemized receipts. If they can’t give you an itemized accounting of how they managed your money (because, as noted above, it’s your money until you spend it) that’s fraud.
Have fun!
You can setup limits though to minimize loss. For example you can say auto reload $5 when your account hits $5 with an absolute monthly limit of $40. Then you don't have risk of losing more than the roughly ~$5 you have in an account.
It would be interesting to see something like:
$100 credits and $13 in taxes refunded as
$97 in refund after merchent fee + $12.61 as reversed taxes.
It's objectively better than nothing for sure. But the thing about this is such complicated nuanced solutions tend to get not done.
Do they care?
> $379 spent on credits in July alone
Still heavily subsidized, you should be thankful they let you use a bit of their compute.
> July 9. My Codex balance - 491.8 credits - vanished to zero.
Well, someone failed a couple of RAFT cornercases. Happens. They are smart boys and will (eventually) make their RAFT consistent.
> Then I asked one simple question: what exactly did I pay for?
You financed development of AGI which will be here soon (er or later) and will make you happy.
> If you prepay OpenAI for credits, know this: if they ever disappear, the company’s official position is that you are not entitled to know where they went.
It very well might be they also have no idea. In a multi-trillion industry your personal signal is just some noise well below noise level.
Also, if you are unhappy with OpenAI - try Anthropic and don't be surprised when you waste $200 in API credits in TWO single requests (not prompts). If you are not happy with Anthropic - give Kimi a try, they still could surprise you even after Anthropic.