My OpenAI prepaid credits vanished with zero transaction history

I topped up $100 in credits on my API account about three weeks ago. Started using them for a side project that routes prompts through the gpt-4o-mini endpoint — nothing exotic, mostly summarization and classification calls. A few days back I checked my billing page and the balance read $0. No invoice, no usage log, no breakdown of which project or key consumed what. Just a flat zero.

I filed a support ticket expecting a quick "here's the invoice" reply. Instead I got a templated response saying the credits were consumed according to their records, but they couldn't share any further detail. No transaction IDs, no timestamps, no endpoint-level breakdown. When I asked them to reverse the charge or at least identify which API key burned through the balance, they bounced me back to the same generic template twice.

The thing that stings is the opacity. Prepaid credits work differently from post-paid — you're fronting money, so you'd expect granular visibility into where every dollar goes. I'm not asking for proprietary secret sauce; I want to see which key, which model, and roughly when. If I'm paying upfront, I should be able to audit my own spend.

What makes this worse is the setup I'm running. I have multiple API keys for different services — one for the production app, one for testing, one for a personal experiment. Without a per-key usage breakdown, there's no way to tell if a stray test call or a runaway loop is the culprit. I've since added rate limits and a spending cap on the keys I don't actively develop on, but that's a band-aid, not a fix.

I've seen others mention similar experiences in community threads — credits disappearing, support offering no receipts, no itemized logs. It feels like a pattern rather than an isolated incident. If you're using prepaid credits, I'd strongly recommend enabling usage alerts and setting hard caps per key. Don't wait until the balance is gone to start tracking.

On the practical side, if you're ever in this situation, screenshot your balance and key IDs before the credits hit zero. It won't force OpenAI to share their internal logs, but it gives you a timestamped reference point to reference in follow-up tickets. Also worth trying the community forums and X — sometimes a public thread gets faster traction than the official support portal.

Still waiting on a meaningful response from them. If anyone here has had better luck getting OpenAI to break down prepaid credit usage with actual detail, I'd be curious what approach worked.