Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year
65 maytc 34 8/5/2025, 1:43:40 AM
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is of course solvable: book the credit as revenue. Transform the dollar credit to points credits that the user can use indefinitely.
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.
I switched to openrouter but will find out if they do the same
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).
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.
Unfortunately they basically can do whatever they want with credits.
https://www.anthropic.com/legal/credit-terms
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.
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?)