Comment by ddtaylor
5 days ago
I also am using OpenRouter because OpenAI isn't a great fit for me. I also stopped using OpenAI because they expire your API credits even if you don't use them. Yeah, it's only $10, but I'm not spending another dime with them.
Hi - I'm the COO of OpenRouter. In practice we don't expire the credits, but have to reserve the right to, or else we have a uncapped liability literally forever. Can't operate that way :) Everyone who issues credits on a platform has to have some way of expiring them. It's not a profit center for us, or part of our P&L; just a protection we have to have.
Pretty sure OP was talking about OpenAI expiring their credits (just had mine expire).
Btw, unsurprisingly, the time for expiry appears to be in UTC in case anyone else is in the situation of trying to spend down their credits before they disappear.
If you're worried about the unlimited liability, how about you refund the credits instead of expiring them?
From my experience with billing systems it is usually not possible to refund a transaction after 6 or 12 months.
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Seems like a weird question to ask OpenRouter Inc, a for-profit company.
Really a shame OpenAI left their non-profit (and open) roots, could have been something different but nope, the machine ate them whole.
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Out of curiosity, what makes you different from a retailer or restaurant that has the same problem?
Why only 365 days? Would be way fairer and still ok for you (if it's such a big issue) to expire them after 5 years.
I wonder if they do this everywhere, in certain jurisdictions this is illegal.
then you shouldn’t use OpenRouter. ToS: 4.2 Credit Expiration; Auto Recharge OpenRouter reserves the right to expire unused credits three hundred sixty-five (365) days after purchase
That is so sleezy.
After how long do they expire?
IIRC, 1 year
Same for anthropic