GoKawiilI was a happy OpenAI customer. ChatGPT Pro subscription, Codex for my daily work as a lighting designer, $379 spent on credits in July alone. This is the story of how OpenAI turned me into someone who will not give them another dollar - and documented every step of it themselves.
July 9. My Codex balance - 491.8 credits - vanished to zero. Not spent: my application logs show the balance wiped within one second, with zero usage in between. I bought 1,000 more credits ($48.40). They never appeared. OpenAI’s own support confirmed in writing my balance was “still $0” after the payment. Then Codex disappeared from my account entirely - along with my project history. Their agent spent over a day walking me through reinstalls before access returned. When it did, $12 of my purchase was already gone. Nobody has ever explained any of this.
July 14. Working against a deadline, with the service flashing “Usage limit exhausted. Add credits to continue,” I bought credits four times in 96 minutes - $193.60. Each 1,000-credit package burned out in about 40 minutes, silently consumed by re-sending the giant working context I had to rebuild after their outage destroyed my history. Not one warning about the consumption rate. Not one “your session is spending $1 per minute.” Just “pay again” - four times in one evening. The same day, their billing system produced seven voided invoices and five failed auto-charges on my account.
Then I asked one simple question: what exactly did I pay for?
Over the following weeks, OpenAI support told me my credits were “fully consumed” - and refused, five separate times in writing, to show a single record of that consumption. Their own words:
“We don’t have visibility into that level of account activity from our support tools.” (July 16)
“We’re unable to provide itemized credit consumption records or usage logs.” (July 22) “We’re unable to provide itemized credit consumption logs, internal ledger records, or other internal usage data.” (July 23 - and again, word for word, July 29) On the one-second balance wipe: “We’re unable to provide any further analysis or internal explanations about the account behavior you described.” (July 29) Think about that. A company that sells prepaid usage units tells you they’re all spent, and when you ask for the receipt - any receipt - the answer is: we can’t show you, we can’t explain, case closed. My formal GDPR request for my own account records? First they pointed me to files on my own laptop. Then they invoked a two-month extension - while simultaneously refusing, in writing, to provide the very records the extension is supposedly needed to review. Here’s what makes this genuinely absurd: I did their homework for them. I analyzed my local session logs, token by token, and I publicly corrected my own initial claim - the July 14 credits were indeed consumed, at a rate no user could have anticipated, with no safeguards, after their outage forced the workflow that caused it. I was more honest with OpenAI about their billing than OpenAI has ever been with me.
Restoring the credits would have cost OpenAI almost nothing - prepaid units, marginal compute cost of a few dollars. Instead they chose: five refusals, a stonewalled data request, a lost Pro subscriber, and this story.
The dispute is now with the regulators - complaint DPC0826667433 with the Irish Data Protection Commission, filed August 5 with the full documented correspondence attached. Everything above is documented - receipts, statements, the full correspondence, and a hash-verified log analysis. I’ll post updates.
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.
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