If you pay for ChatGPT Pro or Business, you can now get free OpenAI API credits every month. OpenAI added this on Oct 28. Here is what I found reading the docs.
How much
Pro gives $100, $200 or $500 a month, matching your Pro tier. Business gives $20 per paid Standard seat and $100 per paid Premium seat, pooled and capped at $500 a month per workspace.
Who qualifies
The subscription has to be paid and at least 7 days old. Trials, Plus, Go and Free don't count. You need to own both the subscription and the API organization, with the same email on both.
How to claim
In ChatGPT go to Settings → Billing (Business uses the workspace billing settings), or start from Billing on the API Platform. Pick the API org and confirm. You only do this once, and no API payment method is needed. If you don't see the option yet, it seems to be rolling out gradually.
The catches
The first grant is prorated, and credits expire at the end of each billing cycle. They cover the Responses, Agents, Realtime and Images APIs plus built-in tools, but not Codex through an API key, and they don't raise your ChatGPT or Codex limits. When they run out, calls fail with a 429 credit_balance_exhausted unless you have paid credits.
Since Codex can't use them, I've been spending mine in CodeCook, a free, MIT-licensed VS Code extension I made. It takes an OpenAI API key, and in long sessions it summarizes older turns and bulky tool output with a cheaper model, so the credits go further. Repo: https://github.com/makayis/codecook
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