Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year
> Your organization “xxx” has $xxx Anthropic API credits that will expire on September 03, 2025 UTC.
>
> To ensure uninterrupted service, we recommend enabling auto-reload for your organization. When enabled, we’ll automatically add credits when your balance reaches a specified minimum. You can enable auto-reload in the Anthropic Console.
Accounting rules. If the credits last indefinitely, any unused credits cannot be counted as revenue. Ran into this at my last company when we signed a big contract and gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars in non-expiring credits. Our accountant went nuts when we told him.
Correct, then you effectively become a holder of someone else’s money, which creates all kinds of legal trouble (you need to put that money into a separate, third party’s account that shields it from bankruptcy etc).
What they could do is automatically refund the credits to the original account as soon as they expire, but that would mean it’s not the deposit but every API request that would be counted as revenue, which creates a whole lot of other complications. Let alone the fact that refunding after a year is problematic as the original payment methods may have expired, changed, and that you’re still the holder of someone else’s money until the credits are used.
Bottom line: this is industry practice, but given how much flack Anthropic has been getting about the lack of transparency lately, this just adds more fuel to the fire and could be defused by some additional explanation from Anthropic’s side.
> you need to put that money into a separate, third party’s account that shields it from bankruptcy
This is wrong. You don’t need to do any of that. They paid for a service and it becomes a liability, but there’s no duty to segregate those funds. You do not turn into a money transfer agent just because you sell pre-paid credits to your service.
Refunding could violate money laundering laws in some countries, and they're in a lot of countries.
Exactly, now you’re a bank (or maybe selling unlicensed securities, either way it’s jeopardy).
We ended up revising the contract so that the credits expired after three years. That opened up its own suboptimal outcomes. It was a lesson that was very much learned by us.
On the topic itself - agreed that Anthropic should take a step back and review its policy around comms and good will in general. They’re supposed to be the “good guys” in the AI game - being up front about this stuff is table stakes for them at this point.
> Exactly, now you’re a bank (or maybe selling unlicensed securities, either way it’s jeopardy).
This seems unlikely - after all, a US federal law (the Credit CARD Act of 2009) requires closed-loop (store/brand-specific) gift cards to be valid for at least 5 years after activation and some states like Florida and California don't allow them to expire at all, so for simplicity national companies don't usually let them expire at all regardless of state. But neither a 5-year expiration nor indefinite validity turns the seller into a bank or an unlicensed securities seller or otherwise puts them in jeopardy.
Naturally, service credits and gift cards are probably treated differently by the CARD Act, but service credits are still not a source of legal jeopardy in the sense you were describing of being an unauthorized participant in the regulated financial world, any more than gift cards are.
I can completely believe, however, that an approach similar to how gift cards must be handled is financially worse on the company's accounting statements than quickly expiring credits. That worse financial accounting consequence would be a completely sufficient explanation for why the company switched approaches.
"you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
If they're non-refundable?
When we hired our pre-ipo CFO at DigitalOcean to start getting it ready, he brought in this whole finance team ofc, full FP&A...anyway they spent a couple months going through everything and then one day the controller called a meeting with me and was like "errr... so what's the story with all the credits?" And I was like "huh?" and he said "well we have millions of dollars of credits you've issued to people..." and I explained "oh, it's just like Tom Dale and Alex Sexton and stuff, they're cool they're not going to spin up $10k+ in infra don't worry" and he basically facepalmed and explained to me the liability I'd created. Whooops! :)
There are other numbers besides 1 and infinity, though
Tracking "revenue" past one financial year is its own accounting hell.
Customers pay Anthropic, in part, so they can figure that one out.
No, that's just accounting
You could count it as revenue once it’s consumed but my understanding is that if you are US based you are essentially acting as a wallet of sort.
This is of course solvable: book the credit as revenue. Transform the dollar credit to points credits that the user can use indefinitely.
Even with a CFO-level explanation, it feels like a weak excuse for "fuck the customer" as always.
Notice that in some places (with good enough customer protection rules) pre-paid credits can't expire, as expiration itself is a clear abuse of market power: they are forcing out revenue from services not given, even if it is "made clear at buy-time". Especially at such short time horizons like 1-year.
And yet they are supposed to be the good guys.
> it feels like a weak excuse for "fuck the customer" as always.
Of course it is just an excuse to "fuck the customer" and grab the money, but it is not something you should question, because in our society you don't question how companies make money.
And it doesn't matter if you are the offended part, people will just protect the state of affairs,even at their own expense.
Just look how people always find a justification for this crap and look how you are being downvoted for pointing another one.
Kind of understandable after seeing the reaction, I would guess that the same tricks are expected to be made by middle-man companies. Hate the game not the players, I guess?
Unfortunately that's what one gets for offloading intelligence into a XaaS (Intelligence as a Service?, we already got IaaS though).
The only hope is that "the market / invisible hand" forces actors to implement more forgiving billing mechanisms and rules via competition or eventual diminished demand. I wouldn't hold my breath though.
Anyways, a very good reason to not depend that much on these tools. Especially on a personal level (i.e. if your programming/moat/skill depends on these tools and you go broke for a time, you can get seriously fucked).
AIaaS seems like the right term: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-...
Definitely Gaas (generation)
Happenned the same for me recently with anthropic and before with openai. It's yearly inflation is infinity which is crazy
I switched to openrouter but will find out if they do the same
I believe OpenRouter currently does not expire credits, but in their terms, they explicitly reserve the right to expire them after 1 year, so they might do it in the future.
OpenRouter takes its cut though
So does OpenAI (last I checked) which I sadly learned the hard way.
I lost my free credits they were giving away a couple years back, but when you pay they make it fairly clear they will expire. I see no issues here from any provider doing this, as long as it is made clear.
This doesn’t sound legal in California at least.
I know gift certificates are not allowed to expire in California and I would hazard a guess that prepaid credits probably wouldn’t be allowed to expire either.
They sign post that everywhere when you buy said credits.
When I first ordered credits and saw that, I moved the amount from 25$ to 10$ and top up 10 whenever I need. Worst case, I lose 10$, which is still bad. But understandable.
Same with OpenAI / ChatGPT. Thieves.
This is not unique to Anthropic: most LLM providers (including OpenAI and Perplexity) do this, and it is explicitly mentioned before you buy the credits that they will expire within a year.
Genuine question: is this an issue with auto-reload? Why not just keep a smaller amount in there at a time and let it auto-reload?
Pirates.
“Oops, we burned through your money, please give us more by this date” - are you serious?
Unfortunately they basically can do whatever they want with credits.
https://www.anthropic.com/legal/credit-terms
Gets "funnier" when you think those credits can be burned in useless tokens (i.e. they have almost negative skin on the game regarding outcomes and incentives to maximize token usage).
Do they? useless tokens take just as much compute to generate as useful tokens. Burning a customer means acquiring a new one which is super expensive.
Yes, obviously it does cost compute (to them) but customers are not paying for the compute per-se, but rather for correct results/outcomes. This is a big alignment and accountability problem, relevant enough to some make companies like Lovable refund credits to customers when errors and token/credit mishandlings are too serious to ignore. That seems unsustainable in the long run though.
I expect this to become even bigger when the hype cools down and companies start looking for ROIs.
PS: I obviously talking about model errors (i.e. like use N tokens in a LLM solving a problem by just deleting/deactivating a test), and not end-user mistakes.
Customers in California and Washington (at least) may beg to differ. In both of those states, prepaid credit (gift certificates, etc.) is not allowed to have an expiry date attached.
Is that specific to gift certificates or any kind of credit, whether digital or on paper?
Credits of a dollar value, not service, I believe.
Like "for a dinner" can expire, because the COGS associated with that can go up, and a business is being cost $100 for a dinner that they may have only been paid $50 for previously.
But if for a dollar amount, then it cannot be expired.
Ashley Home Furnishings, since this reminds me, are all sorts of out of compliance here. We were given gift cards by them for issues with purchases. Fine. Then when we bought our home, several family went there, and purchased gift cards with cash. We tried to use them and were told they could not be used on anything that was discounted or on sale, despite them having received cash for the card. (Side note, guess how easy it is to find anything there that is not ostensibly discounted?)