OpenAI: Free trial, Payment, Token & Limits
Free Trial
After signing up an OpenAI account and applying for an API key, OpenAI provides a $5 worth of free tokens. Click on Usage on the left to view your token balance.
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What are Tokens?
Traditional machine translation is billed based on characters, while OpenAI calculates the usage of ChatGPT based on tokens. For detailed pricing information, please refer to this page. According to the OpenAI helpdesk documentation, a token is approximately:
1 token ~= 4 characters in English
1 token ~= ¾ words
100 tokens ~= 75 words
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Paid Account
Once the $5 worth of free tokens has passed and you wish to continue using the service, you can upgrade to a paid pkan. Click on Billing on the left, then click on Set up paid account.
Enter your credit card information and click "Set up payment method."
After completing these steps, OpenAI will immediately charge $5 to your credit card. This charge is a temporary hold for authorization and will be refunded within seven days. For more details, please refer to the https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7438062-after-updating-my-api-payment-method-i-noticed-a-5-charge-is-this-a-temporary-hold" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" role="link" class="csh-markdown csh-markdown-link csh-markdown-link-text">OpenAI helpdesk documentation.
When using ChatGPT via the API, your usage fees will be directly charged to your credit card by OpenAI.
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Usage Settings
Using ChatGPT via the API is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis, which means you are billed for the actual usage, and the bill is issueded at the end of each month and charged directly to your credit card. If you want to limit your usage, you can go to "Usage" on the left to set limits. OpenAI allows users to set two types of usage limits:
Hard Limit: When your usage reaches the set amount for the month, it will be blocked, and you won't be able to use it further.
Soft Limit: When your usage reaches the set amount for the month, you will receive an email notification.
For example, if you set a monthly limit of $50 (hard limit), you can also set OpenAI to notify you when your usage reaches $45 (soft limit).
Further Reading
OpenAI: How to use ChatGPT in Termsoup
What is timeouts in API connections
OpenAI official helpdesk
Updated on: 05/22/2023
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