What happened with API credits in subscriptions?
On 29 October 2026 Simon Willison, a widely read developer and blogger, reported that OpenAI now gives API credits to people on some ChatGPT plans. Anthropic has done the same for Claude since 7 October. The API is the door a program uses to reach the model without going through the chat, for example to read invoices. The rules are in the two companies' help pages.
- ChatGPT: the $100, $200 and $500 a month Pro plans get credits equal to the price. Business workspaces get $20 per Standard seat and $100 per Premium seat, up to $500 a month. Plus, Enterprise and Edu are excluded.
- Claude: Max gets $100 a month and Ultra $200. Team plans get $20 per Standard seat and $100 per Premium seat, up to $500 a month. Pro and Enterprise are excluded.
- In both cases credits expire at the end of the billing cycle and don't carry over. They go to a single API organisation, linked by the subscription owner.
- The credits don't raise chat limits and don't cover coding assistants: on ChatGPT, Codex used with an API key; on Claude, interactive use of Claude Code.
- According to BleepingComputer, in early November OpenAI emailed subscribers that ChatGPT and Codex will share the same usage limits. OpenAI's guide says the change starts in December.
What does it mean for your business?
Take a ten-person company with three ChatGPT Business Premium seats. Under OpenAI's rules it gets $300 of API credits a month. With that you can try a small program that reads supplier emails and prepares a summary, without asking for a new budget. Unused credits are lost.
Our read: the risk is not the cost, it's the account. The credits land in the API organisation of whoever activates them, and anyone with a key in that organisation can spend them. On ChatGPT Business, if the person who made the link leaves the workspace, the link is removed. Decide first who the owner is and what data may go through the API.
What about us?
OpenAI and Anthropic are among the models we build with, as our Partners page says, and in our systems one model can be swapped for another. As our Pricing page says, an agent always starts read-only on your systems.
What should you do now?
- If you already pay for one of these plans, check the billing page to see whether the credits are there and which API organisation receives them.
- If you activate them for the company, do it from a company account, not from a team member's personal account.
- If you want to test an automation, pick a repetitive job with no personal data and measure how many credits it uses in a month.
“A free credit that expires at the end of the month is an invitation to try. The real project starts when you know what each task costs.”
DBrothers — how we start a prototype
Pick a task your office repeats every day and try having the model read it with the credits you already pay for. If you then want to know whether it holds up in production, we can talk, starting from those numbers.
