zlacker

I just got an email saying they're moving to pre-paid billing... Seems like Sam Altman might've hidden some very large financial costs that the board just discovered?

>>philip+(OP)
Plausible that the reason nobody else has released a GPT4 equivalent is that it costs an unbelievable amount to run but he thought they could get the cost down quickly enough that it wouldn’t matter.

>>philip+(OP)
Can you please share the email?

>>intund+c6
Hi there,

We've updated the billing system for your OpenAI API account. Instead of receiving a bill at the end of the month, you'll now need to pre-purchase credits to use the API. You can add credits to your account by visiting the billing page. To learn more about prepaid billing, please see this help center article prepaid billing.

No action is required from you at this time.

Please note that this change only applies to your OpenAI API account and Playground. It does not affect ChatGPT Plus subscriptions.

Best, The OpenAI team

>>krembo+G8
Sounds like operating costs are a core issue here. Switching to a prepaid model ensures a more consistent cash flow.

>>plutoh+5m
Any company offering an API is going to have some percentage of their customers every month who are shocked to learn that a bug or other failure to rate-limit their own scripts has led to a bill that's 100x larger than they were expecting.

These customers are angry, call Support and Accounting to demand refunds, and cancel their service. There's no upside to having unhappy customers.

Switching to pre-paid billing is probably just better for everyone.

>>marshr+Ds
OpenAI's API has a $ limit you can set, which generally avoids the "100x larger than they were expecting" scenario

>>plutoh+5m
Then why aren't they accepting new customers

>>qgin+f5
But the violent firing and wording could me made much, much easier for both sides if it had been so.

>>philip+(OP)
MSFT runs it on their own infrastructure and gives it away for free in Bing. How come that it's financially feasible for them running it for free and not for OpenAI which has paid subscriptions?