[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year
___________________________________________________________________
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.
Author : maytc
Score : 153 points
Date : 2025-08-05 01:43 UTC (21 hours ago)
| mrbungie wrote:
| 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).
| senkora wrote:
| AIaaS seems like the right term:
| https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-...
| beacon294 wrote:
| Definitely Gaas (generation)
| just-ok wrote:
| So does OpenAI (last I checked) which I sadly learned the hard
| way.
| georgel wrote:
| 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.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Even though they do make it clear, one should still have an
| issue with providers doing it. The reason is that various
| providers like Uber, Lyft, Namecheap, and some cloud vendors,
| etc. do not do it at all. As such it is a fairly unethical
| practice.
| richwater wrote:
| > Even though they do make it clear
|
| > As such, it is theft, plain and simple
|
| What?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| These aren't contradictory. If I say I'm going to steal
| your phone and then I do, notifying you beforehand
| doesn't absolve me of criminal liability. One could argue
| that it's a contractual arrangement, but there's a well
| established doctrine of unconscionability in contract
| law. It's especially applicable when contracts are
| unilateral rather than being negotiated between peers.
| reactordev wrote:
| "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
| mrbungie wrote:
| 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).
| msgodel wrote:
| 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.
| mrbungie wrote:
| 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.
| msgodel wrote:
| Users are charged for compute and whether the outcome is
| positive or negative doesn't cost more for the company. I
| don't see where you got the idea that there are
| _incentives_ to waste tokens.
|
| EDIT (can't reply): Have you never run a business before?
|
| Dating apps are weird because you _can 't_ have repeat
| customers without failing to deliver. With literally
| everything else repeat customers are what you want to
| optimize for. If your AI product fails to deliver your
| customers can't integrate it into their operations and
| you'll lose them eventually. That's a disaster.
| mrbungie wrote:
| Pretty sure we're talking past each other. If you want to
| continue investing on this: the perverse incentive is
| similar to dating apps. If you totally solve your problem
| with less tokens/turns, you eventually churn, paying
| less.
|
| You can argue if they actually choose to follow it or
| not, but the objective truth is that the perverse
| incentive is there.
| mrbungie wrote:
| EDIT (can't reply): Have you never run a business before?
|
| Hmm, yes?, and I've seen perverse incentives ruin things
| even when business-client alignment should be clear.
| Agency problems and stupid execs/investors are a thing.
|
| And honestly, we're leaning into implied ad hominems here
| ("have you never run a business?"), so I'm not engaging
| with you anymore.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| 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.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Is that specific to gift certificates or any kind of credit,
| whether digital or on paper?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| 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?)
| backprop1989 wrote:
| 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.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| 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.
| backprop1989 wrote:
| 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.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| > 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.
| yial wrote:
| With gift cards you end up creating a liabilities account
| and tracking the outstanding value of your issued gift
| cards.
|
| This is almost easier if you have a gift card processor
| who holds the funds for you, but most I've worked with
| either just facilitate transferring money (as in
| franchises ) or simply processing the initial payment.
|
| This means you then have to track your outstanding.
| Depending on the state, if you cease operations you may
| need to escheat the value of the liability account or pay
| the purchasers of the gift cards if you know who they
| are. (Newer POS systems make this possible at times ).
|
| Gift cards on a financial statement are nearly always a
| negative or neutral, as while the money is in a liability
| account, I've seen companies in trouble not actually have
| the funds to cover the liability.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| Yeah, having to track (and under certain circumstances
| resolve) the liability is what I meant by financially
| worse on the accounting statements. An entirely real
| downside that's valid to choose to avoid, but which is
| also not the kind of jeopardy that compares to operating
| a bank or selling securities without the proper
| regulatory approvals. That was my main point to the other
| commenter.
| htrp wrote:
| "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself
| become the villain"
| blindriver wrote:
| > 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Thank you. As someone who used to work for a health
| fintech, it was amazing how often you'd hear loads of
| confidently wrong opinions on stuff like HIPAA (no, saying
| that Lisa couldn't make the meeting because she's out with
| the flu doesn't make it a HIPAA violation) and money
| transferring/KYC/AML/etc. laws. Like you said, selling
| prepaid credits to your service doesn't mean you're covered
| by money transmitter service regs.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I just ignore anyone who doesn't actually own a business
| or administrate compliance on HN, because half the people
| here don't know what they're talking about with basic
| technologies, let alone law or finance.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Did you know it's okay to give bad health information
| advice if you spell it HIPPA instead?
| dylan604 wrote:
| This reminds me of a company in town that was known for
| doing the precise thing of putting money into separate
| accounts, specifically, CDs. It was the type of service
| where 50% was paid up front, 25% at specified milestone,
| remaining 25% at completion. So the company would receive
| the 50% and place a large chunk of that into a CD. There
| were lots of _reasons_ , but my favorite was the excuse of
| it covers when someone fails to pay the last 25%. These
| were the types of jobs that could easily last 6-12 months.
| Lots of people had mixed feelings about this, but at least
| it wasn't paying for office renovations or the owner's car
| payments, etc.
| tom_m wrote:
| If they're non-refundable?
| muzani wrote:
| Refunding could violate money laundering laws in some
| countries, and they're in a lot of countries.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Maybe if they had access to an AI they could have figured
| out which countries customers could be refunded
| OutOfHere wrote:
| That's complete nonsense and lies because Uber, Lyft, and
| some cloud service providers do not have any trouble holding
| on to user credit indefinitely. I absolutely can let my
| credit sit in them indefinitely. As such, expiring my credit
| is deception and theft, plain and simple. It is a practice
| done by lazy robber accountants. The services that do it
| right may not always offer a refund, but at least my credit
| doesn't expire.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's not that, it's a revenue recognition issue. And there
| are lots of tricks around it.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Fun fact: Starbucks is holding 2 BILLION of people's money in
| the form of unused gift cards and pre-paid store credit:
| https://alltrades.substack.com/p/the-bank-of-starbucks
| eviks wrote:
| There are other numbers besides 1 and infinity, though
| muzani wrote:
| Tracking "revenue" past _one_ financial year is its own
| accounting hell.
| eviks wrote:
| No, that's just accounting
| mrbungie wrote:
| Customers pay Anthropic, in part, so they can figure that
| one out.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| It is not actually revenue until it has been spent by the
| customer. Until then it's just customer funds.
| neom wrote:
| 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! :)
| mrbungie wrote:
| 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.
| akagusu wrote:
| > 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.
| mrbungie wrote:
| 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?
| akagusu wrote:
| > Hate the game not the players, I guess?
|
| It's not like the game had fixed rules and everybody is
| playing by the same rules.
|
| The rules are made by the players, while they are playing
| the game.
|
| The problem is that are players following rules the
| benefit all players and are other players doing rules
| that benefit only their own at expense of the others
| sleepybrett wrote:
| You can hate the players for perpetuating the game you
| hate.
| kelnos wrote:
| [delayed]
| csomar wrote:
| 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.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| That's complete nonsense because Uber, Lyft, and some cloud
| service providers, and others do not have this issue. I can let
| my credit sit in them indefinitely. As such, it is deception
| and theft, plain and simple. They may not always offer a
| refund, but at least my credit doesn't expire.
| ikidd wrote:
| You'd have to replace your accountants anywhere that gift cards
| aren't allowed to expire by law.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| How come this never happens to video game companies that give
| out various in-game currencies?
| benabbott wrote:
| Because it does not cost them to provide in-game items
| (skins, weapons, etc.)
|
| On the other hand, certainly does cost companies to provide
| compute.
| ultimatefan1 wrote:
| video game companies definitely have to deal with these same
| kinds of questions.
|
| from https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/accounting-for-
| saas-a... :
|
| Accounting for potions: This is fairly easy. If you sell
| someone a potion, revenue is recognized when they drink the
| potion. Or use their speed boost. Or skip the progress gate
| to get to the next dungeon. The fiction doesn't matter.
| Reality matters, and the economic reality of the situation is
| that performance has happened after the temporary thing
| you've promised is delivered. (Technically speaking you do
| have to recognize the revenue over time if your potions last
| long enough to be close to monthly SaaS contracts, but
| practically speaking most are over with in a day and most
| accounting systems lose precision below that.)
|
| Accounting for swords: If you trade gems for swords then you
| can ratably recognize the purchase price of the gems when you
| satisfy your obligation by giving the player a new sword.
|
| Hah, just kidding. That would be way too easy.
|
| You actually need to recognize the prorated cost of the gems
| exchanged for the sword over the economically useful life of
| the imaginary sword. "Economically useful life" is a concept
| with a lot of prior art on it in accounting. You are
| obligated to, and accountants can point to substantial work
| on, estimating the economically useful life of factories,
| cruise ships, CNC machines, bunk beds, Bitcoin miners, dairy
| cattle, and almost everything else that depreciates.
|
| But there is not a huge amount of prior art on imaginary
| swords. So you get to pick one of two methods..
|
| The first, by far less commonly used, is to put your head
| together with very expensive accounting professionals and
| rigorously answer the question "What events in reality, in
| the universe we actually live in, would cause the owner of
| this imaginary sword to believe it had no or de minimis
| future value to them?" And perhaps that conversation would
| involve questions like power creep, game balance changes,
| declining player preference for swords now that you're
| offering a sale on imaginary nuclear weapons, etc.
|
| Nobody has time for that conversation or the truly gargantuan
| amount of implementation engineering required to enforce the
| decision it comes up with, so they largely use door #2: the
| economically useful life of a virtual good is by nature upper
| bounded by the economically useful life of a player's
| relationship with our game, so use that instead.
|
| You are required to use your existing data to make a
| reasonable estimate of how long either the particular player
| or, failing that, the hypothetical spherical frictionless
| average player will continue to play the game after the
| purchase. Then you recognize the price of the sword ratably
| over that time period.
|
| This causes many virtual goods companies to have bookings
| (player purchases) diverge sharply from revenue. That
| depresses the value of their companies, in the real world,
| and those companies then spend substantial amounts of
| professional labor taking their frustration out on imaginary
| swords.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| This is specifically about revenue recognition under accrual
| accounting - unexpired credits are considered "deferred
| revenue" (a liability) until used or expired. Companies prefer
| definite expiration dates to avoid carrying growing liabilities
| on their balance sheets indefinitely.
| ksec wrote:
| What about Starbucks top up card or Apple iTunes Credit?
|
| How would those work?
| bpavuk wrote:
| unlike Anthropic, iTunes and Starbucks are profitable.
|
| suppose iTunes gets $1 from every $5 spent there. if Apple
| sold a $50 gift card, it can pocket $10 and not worry about
| it. Anthropic, OTOH, sells their API _at loss_ , so unused
| credits mean losses that await to be materialized. it is
| unprofitable for them to let you keep the compute bucks
| forever.
| senko wrote:
| > Anthropic, OTOH, sells their API at loss,
|
| Sources? It is widely believed that their fixed-price plans
| lose money, but last I heard API (price per token) had
| positive margins?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Maybe in some universe. Companies like this grow so fast
| you have no idea, and any prognostication about making
| money is just frankly bullshit.
|
| Growth hides all sins, as long as the investors keep
| ponying up.
| tart-lemonade wrote:
| Retailers have historical data on gift card redemptions and,
| using this data, can recognize portions of the unspent value
| of the gift cards as revenue when that portion is unlikely to
| be redeemed.
| neom wrote:
| In addition to this, gift cards have a _specific_ carve out
| in consumer protection laws, "business credits" do not and
| fall under accounting practices, specifically ASC 606, and
| specifically around "breakage", as as tart-lemonade is
| referencing.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I don't really get this logic. Why don't they count it as
| revenue the moment the credits are issued?
|
| Or is this more just a "this is a convenient free win as a
| consequence of how we decide to manage our books."
| Havoc wrote:
| > Why don't they count it as revenue the moment the credits
| are issued?
|
| Because the corresponding service hasn't been rendered yet.
| Conceptually you want the revenue and the costs to generate
| it recognised at roughly same time else your P/L number is
| volatile/meaningless
| gwd wrote:
| > Why don't they count it as revenue the moment the credits
| are issued?
|
| You've gotten the revenue but you haven't paid the cost for
| that revenue yet. Those are essentially un-cashed checks that
| the accountants have to keep on the books indefinitely
| otherwise. Imagine you're chugging along and out of the blue
| someone shows up with $100M of credits they bought 10 years
| ago, expecting you to do something for them. Now you're using
| electricity and displacing _new_ revenue for money that may
| be long gone.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is legal in California. There's a law here
| specifically to prevent gift cards from expiring automatically.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Not accounting rules. Shady accounting. Sell someone credits
| that expire or not expire.. if you sell someone something that
| expires you can get some free money.
| pzo wrote:
| Happenned the same for me recently with anthropic and before with
| openai. It's yearly inflation is infinity which is crazy
|
| I switched to openrouter but will find out if they do the same
| bakugo wrote:
| I believe OpenRouter currently does not expire credits, but in
| their terms, they explicitly reserve the right to expire them
| after 1 year, so they might do it in the future.
| rsanek wrote:
| OpenRouter takes its cut though
| blindriver wrote:
| This doesn't sound legal in California at least.
|
| I know gift certificates are not allowed to expire in California
| and I would hazard a guess that prepaid credits probably wouldn't
| be allowed to expire either.
| copypaper wrote:
| Genuine question: is this an issue with auto-reload? Why not just
| keep a smaller amount in there at a time and let it auto-reload?
| mediumsmart wrote:
| Pirates.
| sometimes_all wrote:
| This is not unique to Anthropic: most LLM providers (including
| OpenAI and Perplexity) do this, and it is explicitly mentioned
| before you buy the credits that they will expire within a year.
| ranguna wrote:
| They sign post that everywhere when you buy said credits.
|
| When I first ordered credits and saw that, I moved the amount
| from 25$ to 10$ and top up 10 whenever I need. Worst case, I lose
| 10$, which is still bad. But understandable.
| vizzah wrote:
| Same with OpenAI / ChatGPT. Thieves.
| verdverm wrote:
| Here's an idea, bill me for usage and let me set limits, instead
| of this pay upfront and if you don't use it we keep it model
|
| Anthropic tried to charge my card a few weeks back, but
| fortunately it was declined by my card. I haven't used their
| service in 6+ months, but they still want to try and take my
| money
| rgbrgb wrote:
| That's the exact day my credits expire. Weird coincidence?
| aldousd666 wrote:
| I got a notice like this about my credits. It was only $30, so it
| was a good reason to try out claude code for the first time. I
| probably would have kept putting it off if I hadn't run into the
| threat of expiring credits. I know that isn't why they do it, but
| it had that effect on me.
| freedomben wrote:
| To be fair, this is prominently displayed in the console, so they
| aren't trying to hide it. I personally hate the idea of expiring,
| but as other commenters have mentioned there are pretty good
| reasons for this (accounting, banking laws, etc).
| korkybuchek wrote:
| Accounting rules:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakage_(accounting)
| peteforde wrote:
| I suppose this is the same reason that they quietly expire
| Audible credits after a year. Drives me absolutely bonkers.
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