"We've updated the billing system for your OpenAI API account. Instead of receiving a bill at the end of the month, you'll now need to pre-purchase credits to use the API. You can add credits to your account by visiting the billing page. To learn more about prepaid billing, please see this help center article prepaid billing.

No action is required from you at this time.

Please note that this change only applies to your OpenAI API account and Playground. It does not affect ChatGPT Plus subscriptions."

The 'help' page they link to in the email https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8264644-what-is-prepaid-billing is out-of-date (says its optional) which may indicate it was rushed out (?)

Another user posted about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312625 but it was flagged due to the link (the help text) being out of date and not saying users are now forcibly migrated to the prepaid usage.

The financial implication is this will shrink their Accounts Receivable and may temporarily increase their cash inflow.

Would love to hear from other users that got this notice what their monthly spend was; and if only 'light usage' accounts were affected.