OpenAI Switches to Prepaid Billing

Headline is wrong, the link isn't t about a change but a how-to documentation page last updated “over a week ago” about how prepaid credits interact with monthly invoiced billing, and how to set up automatic prepaid billing. Monthly invoiced billing is not (from anything there) going away.

Wild guess, maybe OpenAI is deeply in debt and Sam Altman was hiding it (possibly committing fraud)? Because a benefit to prepaid billing is that they&#x27;ll get more cash in the short term.<p>Also, at least part of the debt may be because people were getting compute without paying for it in the pay-per-use model. This could explain why paid memberships are being paused too (e.g. people mass-registering and then getting chargebacks).

Cloud costs are already expensive, so let&#x27;s change to doing normal computing tasks in an insanely inefficient manner on the cloud?<p>If you&#x27;re a cloud computing provider&#x2F;DC operator, inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.<p>At some point things still need to be competitive against existing, entrenched, optimized systems.

<p><pre><code> Updated over a week ago </code></pre> This doesn&#x27;t sound like news...

&gt; Updated over a week ago<p>Is this actually new? The article doesn&#x27;t even mention anything about <i>switching</i> to prepaid billing.

Flowers for Algernon denouement

It didn&#x27;t switch to anything at all, that&#x27;s just a new option for orgs who want to avoid the downside of monthly billing.<p>I weep.<p>This is obvious if you read even the first paragraph.