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Tell HN: OpenAI now requires ID verification and won't refund API credits

114•retube•6h ago
Just frustrated here: I credited my OpenAI API account with credits, and then it turns out I have to go through some verification process to actually use the API, which involves disclosing personal data to some third-party vendor, which I am not prepared to do. So I asked for a refund and am told that that refunds are against their policy.

So I'll be cancelling my chatgpt plus sub, disputing the card payment, and moving to deepseek.

Edit: Deepseek seems to be a lot cheaper than OpenAI

Edit 2: seems verification is only needed for gpt-5, gpt-4o seems to work without it

Comments

bn-l•6h ago
Was this for all models?
retube•5h ago
Good q. I was trying with gpt-5, but it seems gpt-4o works without verification. However 4o is I guess not as good, plus it seems to be twice as expensive as 5
andai•1h ago
I believe it started with o3 Pro, back in the day.
chistev•5h ago
Interesting
egorfine•3h ago
Indeed. I have opened the playground and it doesn't let me choose GPT-5. Obviously I will not be KYCing myself.

But that's okay. There are plenty of other models. Perhaps not bleeding edge great, but great nevertheless.

SarahPeter•3h ago
Exactly most users don’t need GPT-5 for everyday workloads anyway.
egorfine•43m ago
I meant competitors.
tensility•1h ago
As far as I understand, many users are better off with GPT-4o anyway. Amusing to be charging premiums for an objectively bad upgrade, but I guess that's the kind of bullshit economics that hype cycles create.
egorfine•43m ago
I meant competitors
Lapra•3h ago
They are a porn company now, after all.
goshx•2h ago
Perhaps this was the reason behind the move.
nopurpose•1h ago
huh? What did I miss?
JimmyBiscuit•1h ago
"ChatGPT will soon allow erotica for verified adults, says OpenAI boss" https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpd2qv58yl5o
lossolo•1h ago
"Sam Altman says ChatGPT will soon sext with verified adults"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45582874

crazygringo•3h ago
Just searched for their actual policies to corroborate and found the policies on ID verification:

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...

And that credits are nonrefundable:

https://openai.com/policies/service-credit-terms/

It absolutely seems like terrible horrible customer service not to issue refunds in this case. Obviously the credits can still be used for most of the models, so it's not like you can't do anything with them. But if someone explains they bought the credits specifically to use with the verification-gated models and then discovered they couldn't (since apparently verification fails for some people), there's no question that refunds are the right thing to do. What is OpenAI thinking?

(BTW, speculation seems to be that the verification process doesn't have anything to do with know-your-customer laws or anti-fraud, but is intended to prevent competitors like Chinese DeepSeek from having large-scale access to OpenAI's best models.)

potamic•2h ago
That's kinda scammy. It's not like they have to manage shipments and handle goods or anything. I wonder if they're banking on a percentage of users leaving credits unused like credit card companies do with loyalty points.
logicchains•2h ago
>(BTW, speculation seems to be that the verification process doesn't have anything to do with know-your-customer laws or anti-fraud, but is intended to prevent competitors like Chinese DeepSeek from having large-scale access to OpenAI's best models.)

It's not because OpenAI's CEO is also the founder of WorldCoin, a project to ID everyone?

egorfine•45m ago
Funny though their KYC process is not done via WorldCoin. Obviously because WorldCoin KYC is useless for authorities.
pjmlp•1h ago
Depending on where the post author is located, whatever says on those links is worth garbage if they are located in Europe.

Most European countries have consumer protection agencies with teeth, and a company cannot decide on their own what they refund or not.

irvingprime•1h ago
Customer service? In the age of AI? What have you been smoking?
mkbkn•3h ago
Raise a chargeback
rhetocj23•2h ago
This - and in future ensure any purchases are made on a credit card not debit card.
tobwen•1h ago
In Europe, SEPA direct debits can also be withdrawn. But you can expect to receive a reminder with legal action within a few days.
throway12345•2h ago
Is it by any chance because your POST is requesting a summary of the reasoning, e.g. setting {summary: "auto"} or somesuch? I know that requires verification.
gdulli•2h ago
It's hard to know exactly which forms it will end up taking, but dependence on these companies is going nowhere good. And more quickly than it took streaming (for example) to go from offering a better experience (to win market share) to the current (and inevitable) norm of raising prices constantly and introducing unskippable ads.
CaptainOfCoit•2h ago
> and introducing unskippable ads.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but where on either ChatGPT or the API platform OpenAI hosts are you seeing ads?

mapontosevenths•2h ago
> it took streaming...

Parent is comparing OpenAI to other companies that followed a similar trajectory of enshittification.

gdulli•1h ago
Yes, and just as ads eventually came to streaming in a worse form (unskippable, hypertargeted) that cable companies didn't have the ability to innovate, the new frontier of ads will again come with qualitatively worse innovations. Seamless and undisclosed in conversational LLM output.
dawnerd•1h ago
I could totally see them having responses sprinkled with subtle marketing. Ask it for the best travel backpack and ooops all sponsored.
conception•1h ago
This is already the case for OpenAI. Go ask for some backpack recommendations.
jarym•2h ago
Wonder how long before they'll have to start reporting 'suspicious activity' to the government same as financial institutions have to do for money transfers.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•2h ago
You can reasonably assume it is already happening. The only difference is that for FIs it is required by law, that it is relatively similar across the board in terms of implementation and openai is a one giant source of info you wouldn't get anywhere else.

It fairly accurately measured my age, location, place of birth and political inclinations based on our conversations alone. I am certain it can infer a lot more.

weird-eye-issue•1h ago
Absolutely not. It would require product, engineering, admin, etc. effort to do that and unless it isn't required by law why would they waste the time when they have a lot else to do?
bgwalter•1h ago
They have an ex-NSA chief on the board, and doing surveillance voluntarily may result in government help like getting contracts in South-Korea and Argentine that may bring in far more money than the implementation costs. Perhaps they outsource the implementation to Palantir or the NSA. It is basically a simple middleware that is inserted somewhere once the traffic is decrypted.

So I don't think implementation costs are an obstacle.

orthecreedence•1h ago
> why would they waste the time

Because then the NSA shows up with an NSL, you integrate with the fascist surveillance state or you lose your business. How have people forgotten this so fucking quickly?

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•49m ago
To be fair, I am interested in the subject and I don't even remember the name of the telecom that tried to buck under pressure and went out of business not long after. It has been that long. It is possible so I give people some grace.
egorfine•43m ago
This.

There is no other reason to require KYC for a server-side text transformation tool, no matter how impressive it is.

seneca•2h ago
Yeah, I'm not at all willing to do these sorts of verifications. Any company doing them essentially doesn't exist to me. I don't even use Anthropic because they require a phone number to register.
quantummagic•2h ago
Same. I don't understand why so many people are happy to give their phone number to some random service provider. It's a shame it has become normalized.
CaptainOfCoit•2h ago
My phone number is basically public and has been for 20 years, every email I send has my phone number and it's findable via the public internet too.

Not sure why people see their phone number as something private?

FWIW, I've heard some people saying they avoid it because of spam, I've been on my local anti-spam list since I got my current phone number, and receive about 1 spam call every week or something. Maybe there is one for where you live too.

seneca•2h ago
You're lucky. In my experience no-call lists don't work.

I command a significant budget and even with a lot of effort to not proliferate my phone number, I get at least half a dozen spam or sales calls a day. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I didn't attempt to protect it. Perhaps it would be the same and I should just give up, but I'm not willing to try.

The other side of the coin is that it's just none of their business. They don't need my phone number to sell me SaaS software. There is no upside for me to give it to them.

CaptainOfCoit•1h ago
> You're lucky. In my experience no-call lists don't work.

I don't think so, I've had friends and acquaintances that had the same issue as you, multiple spam calls per day. I helped them add themselves to their national list, and after a month or two the constant spamming stops.

I think you might just be unlucky living in country that doesn't have such list that works OK. I've lived in multiple different countries so far in my life, and it's been the same thing in all of them, adding myself to the list eventually makes the spam stop.

binarymax•2h ago
GPT-5 works, just not GPT-5 streaming. I posted about this a little while ago with more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837367
thr0w•2h ago
What is it about streaming specifically that necessitates this? Am I missing something obvious?
syntaxing•2h ago
You can try the latest GLM 4.6 https://z.ai/ . Their coding plan is $6 a month and performs on par to Sonnet 4 for my personal task. Sonnet 4.5 still has an edge though. All of ZLM’s models are also open sourced so you can run it locally if you want
mark_l_watson•2h ago
I am mostly retired but I am thinking of restarting a solo products mini-company next year. I have been looking at much less expensive options like Alibaba Cloud, GLM, Kimi K2, etc. There is a recent Stanford study showing most US startups are using less expensive Chinese models, but I think usually hosted in the US.

For now I am happy enough with Gemini and GPT-5 because my usage is so lite that anything is cheap. For many engineering use cases, Gemini-2.5-flash-lite works well enough.

How do you use GLM? With codex —oss? Or, just ‘raw’ with no agent-wrapping coding environment?

mistrial9•1h ago
> There is a recent Stanford study showing most US startups are using less expensive Chinese models

link ?

Kiboneu•1h ago
One more step towards worldcoin .. .
gidellav•1h ago
Just use openrouter, allows to connect to all models
Scene_Cast2•1h ago
OpenRouter has some gotchas with OpenAI models. In some cases it requires an OpenAI key.
Deathmax•1h ago
Not anymore, especially after other routers like Vercel's AI Gateway and proxies from LLM providers like Fal, DeepInfra, and AtlasCloud didn't get the memo of enforcing BYOK for ID verification required models after GPT-5's release.
tensility•1h ago
No problem. I have zero intention of feeding them or any of their competitors any money, ever. If AI vendors so deeply want to eliminate a path to income for everyone on the planet, let's start with not giving them any income, especially since their intellectual assets are mostly purloined. This is the wave of layoffs that will actually make me happy to hear about. Let Altman, Elmo, Zuck, and all the other similar shitheads starve, like they apparently intend for 99% of humanity.
senordevnyc•44m ago
I understand the anger, but do you really want to live in the world of anarchy that would be required for these people to starve? Because if the billionaires are starving, the rest of us are long gone at that point.
comrade1234•1h ago
I put $2 on my deepseek account and have barely used it, it's so cheap.

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