Since October 28, OpenAI has been adding a monthly credit for its own programming interface to the ChatGPT Pro and ChatGPT Business subscriptions. With the credit, you pay for requests to the OpenAI API, through which your own apps, automations, and agents access the models. You have to activate the offer yourself once, after which OpenAI automatically credits it with every renewal of the subscription.
Free, Go, and Plus get nothing, nor do trial periods, Enterprise, and Edu. According to the help page, whether the offer already shows up in your account depends on the country and on whether OpenAI has already enabled your account. OpenAI does not publish a list of countries, but the three Pro tiers and Business can be booked normally in Germany.
How much credit comes with which subscription?
For the three Pro tiers, the credit in dollars corresponds exactly to the number after which OpenAI names the tier: Pro 100, Pro 200, and Pro 500. Billing is in dollars, even if you pay for the subscription in euros.
With Business, every paid license counts, with a Premium license yielding five times as much as a Standard license. All contributions end up in a shared pool, which OpenAI caps at the amount of the largest Pro tier. Five Premium or 25 Standard licenses already exhaust this limit. With annual prepayment, the annual credit arrives all at once.
The first credit is prorated, depending on how many days are left in the current billing period. Whatever is left at its end expires.
How do you activate the credit?
Your subscription must have been running as a paid one for at least seven days. You also need an account on OpenAI's API platform with the same email address as in ChatGPT; a newly created one is sufficient.
- In ChatGPT, open the settings and then billing; for Business, the workspace billing.
- Start the activation at the API credit entry.
- Check the API organization that should receive the credit and confirm.
- In the billing settings of the API platform, check whether the credit has arrived.
With Business, the same person must be the owner of the workspace and of the API organization; an admin role is not enough. Each subscription can be linked to exactly one organization, and afterward only support can change this link.
What does the credit cover and what does it not?
The credit covers almost everything the API platform bills: requests to the Responses API, the Agents API, and the Images API for generating or editing images, real-time voice dialogues, as well as built-in tools such as web search. You do not pay for Codex via an API key with it, and your usage limits in ChatGPT remain unchanged.
Without a line of code, you can try out prompts and voice outputs directly in the browser in the Playgrounds, the test environments of the API platform; these tests also count against the credit. Since OpenAI halved the API prices with GPT-6.1 Terra, the same credit is enough for at least twice as many requests with the new model as with its predecessor.
OpenAI continues to bill the subscription and the API separately. The only new thing is that the subscription pays for part of the API usage.
What this means for you
Choose the API organization carefully when activating: if you also work in a client's organization, the credit belongs in your own.
It is best not to add a payment method on the API platform as long as you are only experimenting. Once the credit is used up, the API rejects further requests, and no bill comes. With automatic top-up, this limit disappears.
It is best to schedule larger tasks, such as image descriptions for an entire photo archive, before the end of your billing period. The credit alone is no reason to switch from Plus: the smallest Pro tier costs about four and a half times as much as Plus in Germany.
How to address your own chats and assistants via the interface is shown in the course on the OpenAI API at TutKit.
OpenAI announced the credit on October 28, 2026, in the release notes for ChatGPT.
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