Is OpenAI giving away money? You can claim API credits worth up to 500 US dollars per month.

After topping up for OpenAI for so long, can you finally get some money back?

Just now, OpenAI launched a new benefit — Eligible ChatGPT Pro and Business subscribers can now receive up to $500 in free API credits per month, and this is not a one-time offer for new users. As long as the subscription and the benefit policy remain valid, you will automatically get the credits in each billing cycle.

So how to claim it specifically, and who is eligible? Let's take a look together.

Up to $500 per month for free, how to claim it specifically?

First and foremost: this benefit covers ChatGPT Pro and eligible Business users, and the subscription must have been active for at least 7 days. The highest monthly active Plus users, Go, free tier, trial users, Enterprise, Edu and old version Codex seats are all not on the eligible list.

According to OpenAI's official Help Center and developer documentation, the specific credits are as follows:

For the Pro plan, it's very straightforward: you get exactly the amount you paid back. In other words, for a developer who originally spends more than $100 per month on API calls, the Pro subscription is now effectively "free".

The Business plan works on a "pooled contribution per seat with a cap" model: each Standard seat adds $20 to the team pool, and each Premium seat adds $100, but the entire workspace has a monthly cap of $500. The official also gave examples: 5 Standard seats + 3 Premium seats make a pool of 100+300 = $400; 10 Standard seats + 4 Premium seats sum up to $600, but you can only get $500. That means 25 Standard seats or 5 Premium seats will fill up the pool, and adding more seats won't increase the total credits. For annual-paying Business workspaces, the full-year credits will be issued in one lump sum, with a cap of $6,000.

What can these credits be used for? You can refer to this table for calculation:

There is also an easily overlooked detail: the amount you receive for the first time may be lower than the full monthly credit amount. The reason is that OpenAI will calculate the amount proportionally based on the remaining time of the current subscription cycle, rather than issuing a full month of credits no matter which day you claim it.

So what's the specific operation? Eligible users can go to the ChatGPT billing settings, find the API credits related benefits, select the API Organization you own, complete the association and confirm to claim. You can also initiate the association from the OpenAI API billing page.

You can claim the credits, but there are usage restrictions

For developers who actually use the API, the coverage of this benefit is not narrow.

According to OpenAI's documentation, the free credits can be used to pay for eligible API fees incurred by the associated organization, including text and code related Responses API, interfaces for running Agents, Realtime voice interfaces, image generation and editing, as well as built-in tools such as web search, file search, Code Interpreter, and corresponding usage and storage fees.

This means developers can use the credits for actual application prototypes, Agent workflows, and multimodal product testing, not just simple chat model calls.

But there are three restrictions that deserve special attention:

First, the free credits do not cover Codex-related consumption via API Key, nor will they increase the usage cap of ChatGPT or the login-based Codex itself. Therefore, if you purchase a Pro membership mainly to get more Codex programming credits, do not directly regard the newly gifted API balance as extra Codex usage times.

Second, the credits have an expiration date. The monthly gifted credits will expire at the end of the current subscription billing cycle, and the unused part cannot be rolled over. For example, if you get $200 in credits in a full billing cycle but only consume $30, the remaining $170 will not be carried over to the next month.

Third, free credits do not mean unlimited calls. OpenAI's request frequency, token rate, model permissions, and organization and project-level limits are still in effect. You can use valid gifted credits without binding an API payment method; but once the balance is exhausted, if there is no other available balance, the request will fail due to insufficient credits. For organizations that have already purchased API credits, the gifted credits will be consumed first, followed by the purchased credits.

This also means that the so-called "$500 free API" is essentially a service credit with specified usage purposes and validity period. How much money you can actually save depends on how much API fees you would have incurred originally.

It is also worth emphasizing that OpenAI reserves the right to adjust or cancel this benefit in the future in its terms. Therefore, you cannot simply treat it as a permanent membership benefit.

Why is OpenAI being so generous all of a sudden?

Why did OpenAI suddenly start "giving away money"? Overall, there are the following possible motivations.

The most straightforward motivation is: they want to divert subscription users to become API customers.

From the results, this benefit is equivalent to leaving a permanent balance in the API account of every Pro and Business user. Once you start using this balance to build applications and run Agents, you step into OpenAI's developer ecosystem, which is where it sells high-value services such as Agents API and hosted sandboxes. Moreover, the rule design is very subtle: the credits are cleared at the end of the month and consumed prior to paid balance, which is equivalent to urging you to "use it up quickly" every month. As you keep using it, you will get used to it, and the excess part will naturally turn into real revenue.

In addition, they are also facing competition from Anthropic and dissatisfaction from developers, which this move can also help improve at the same time.

Around October 7, Anthropic announced along with Claude Haiku 5.5 that Claude Max 5x users will receive $100 in API credits per month, Max 20x users will receive $200, and the Team plan has a shared pool with a cap of $500. Three weeks later, OpenAI launched its own version: Pro 100 gets 100% cashback, Pro 200 gets 100% cashback, and the Business plan has a pooled cap of $500. If you think about it carefully, the numbers are almost one-to-one corresponding.

The dissatisfaction of developers is also a recent event. Just a month ago, OpenAI triggered strong dissatisfaction in the developer community after cutting the Codex and ChatGPT Work credits of the Pro 200 tier from 20x to 10x (effective October 30) while launching the $500 Pro 500 tier. Now that Pro 200 users get $200 in API credits back every month, it's more or less a "makeup for the loss": the chat and programming credits are reduced, but you get an equivalent API stored value card.

After the news was released, many developers shared the news that they had received the credits, but some people said they did not receive them. For the specific reasons, you can check the official QA released by OpenAI to figure it out.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Jiqi Zhixin (ID: almosthuman2014)", written by Jiqi Zhixin, and published with authorization from 36Kr.