ChatGPT Ads credit, explained

by Harry Watts · Last reviewed 13 September 2026

OpenAI published its ad credit terms on 29 July 2026, and the interesting thing about them is what they decline to say. There is no amount in the document, no spend requirement, no window and no end date, because every one of those is deferred to something the terms call "the Offer", defined as the email or communication that made the credit available. The framework governs what a credit is and how it dies. Your email governs everything you would actually want to know before agreeing to it — and only you can read it. That is an unusual arrangement, and it means a page like this one cannot honestly tell you what you will be offered. What it can do is set out what the framework commits OpenAI to regardless of which wave you are in, which parts of your email are the parts that matter, and which questions are worth putting in writing first, because this is the youngest of the three platforms and its offers have already differed between markets by an order of magnitude. Below is the credit as a mechanism rather than as a number, since the number will be the first thing here to go out of date.

The three things the terms decide

If you read nothing else: credits expire 90 days after issue, the spend that earns a credit can never be paid with credit, and OpenAI may modify, suspend or terminate an offer at any point.

Those three sit in the framework, so they apply to every wave and every market unless your own offer overrides them. Everything else you want to know is in your email, and if it is not in your email it is not committed to anywhere. What follows is one of those three, a consequence of them, or a question to ask before acting on any of it.

What the framework actually commits to

Short, and worth reading once, because it is the only stable part of this.

• 90 days, then it is gone. Unless your offer says otherwise, credits expire 90 days after issuance and any unused balance is forfeited. OpenAI states that it will not replace, reinstate or pay for unused, expired, suspended, revoked or voided credits.
• Only fees incurred after the credit is issued are eligible. Nothing you spent earning it can be recovered by it.
• Credit does not count towards spending requirements. You cannot use credit to earn credit.
• No stacking. Credits cannot be combined with any other credit, coupon, discount, rebate, incentive or makegood.
• Tax is yours. VAT is calculated on fees net of any credit, and you remain liable for tax the credit does not cover, charged to your payment method.
• Revocable. Credits may be suspended, revoked or voided for nonpayment, fraud, misuse, an issuance error, or conduct inconsistent with the offer. Your account must be in good standing, determined at OpenAI's sole discretion.
• No price matching. OpenAI may modify, suspend or terminate an offer, and expressly grants no right to retroactive true-ups or to credits offered to other customers. If a better wave lands next month, you have no claim on it.

What your email decides

Everything else. The amount, the spend requirement, the window, what starts the window, the end date, and whether the 90-day expiry applies or is overridden by the offer.

Terms of the UK invitation I received in late August 2026, re-checked against the published framework on 13 September 2026. OpenAI publishes none of this, and waves have differed. Your own email governs.

For scale, trade coverage of a US wave a month earlier described a $50 credit matched against $50 of spend within 14 days, with a separate $100 credit alongside it, and noted that credit values were still moving while OpenAI worked out the right numbers. Whatever the exchange rate does to that comparison, the gap between the two waves is large — and it opened in about a month. Which is the argument for reading your own email rather than anyone's article, this one included.

The one that catches people out: the pre-drafted campaign

The UK invitations arrive with a campaign already built in your Ads Manager account. Mine was assembled from what OpenAI could reasonably infer about the business — one button from live.

Nothing in the credit terms or the help documentation ties the credit to that campaign. There is no documented condition requiring you to use it, edit it, or leave it alone. So treat it as a convenience rather than an obligation, and treat it the way any auto-generated campaign deserves: as machinery built to get you spending quickly rather than to represent you accurately. The dated take on the August offer goes through what to check before launching it.

It belongs on this page for a narrower reason. A spend window and a pre-built campaign, arriving together, make it very easy to launch without reading. If your window really is a fortnight, that combination is doing work on you, and it is worth noticing.

The clocks, and the one that is not a clock

That last row is the one to plan around. Ads Manager requires identity verification before an account is fully operational, and OpenAI describes it as a rolling queue that may take some time. If your qualifying window runs from the date of the email rather than the date your account can spend, verification delay eats into it. Nothing published says which it is, which is the first of the four questions below. Two things make that worse rather than better. Clearing identity verification is not the same as being approved to advertise: OpenAI treats them as separate steps and says completing one does not mean the account can run campaigns. And it states plainly that it cannot expedite either review. So if the clock is running, there is no lever to pull.

Before you spend anything, get four things in writing

To ads-support@openai.com, and keep the reply.

1. What starts the qualifying window, and when does it end? Email date, account approval, first spend or campaign launch. Those can be days apart.
2. Does the 90-day expiry apply, or does this offer set its own? The framework defers to the offer, and your email may not say.
3. Does the pre-drafted campaign have to be used? Almost certainly not, but nothing documents it either way.
4. Does verification delay count against the window? If it does, the window is shorter than it looks.

None of these are unreasonable questions, and each of them has cost somebody money on one platform or another. How they get answered also tells you something useful about how new this ad business still is.

Whether the credit is worth the spend it requires

A matched credit halves the cost of a test. It does not improve the platform, and here the thing to check before committing real money is whether you will be able to tell what happened.

Reporting is thin by the standards of the other two. Breakdowns stop at device, country and platform, and the targeting now goes finer than that: OpenAI documents states or regions, cities, DMAs and postcodes "where available", with availability varying by country, and tells advertisers to search the campaign location picker to see what theirs offers. Nothing reads results back below country, so you can buy a postcode and never be told what it did. Conversions lag a day or two. The view-through window is fixed at one day, and those conversions are reported separately rather than counted in the headline figure. OpenAI states in its own FAQ that there are no performance benchmarks across advertisers, industries or campaign types yet, which is honest and also means you have nothing to judge your results against except your own numbers. And ads are not shown to users on Plus, Pro or Business plans, or to anyone identified as under 18, so the audience is narrower than the user count implies.

The tracking itself is real: an OpenAI Pixel with a click identifier appended to your landing page URL, a conversions API with event deduplication, and Automatic Advanced Matching. But you cannot judge this channel on its own dashboard, and doubling delivery on an account you cannot measure doubles the ambiguity rather than the learning. If the measurement is not wired before the first pound, the credit is not a discount on evidence — it is a discount on noise.

Quick answers

The whole of what OpenAI has committed to in public is that the credit dies in 90 days and can be withdrawn at its discretion. Everything you would use to decide arrived in an email only you can see, which is a reason to keep it rather than a reason to refuse the offer.