Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year

#31

Post by muzani » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 5:27 AM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #7

backprop1989 wrote: post #6

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.

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, whi…

Refunding could violate money laundering laws in some countries, and they're in a lot of countries.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year

#32

Post by eviks » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 5:30 AM UTC

muzani wrote: post #30

eviks wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other numbers besides 1 and infinity, though

Tracking "revenue" past one financial year is its own accounting hell.

No, that's just accounting

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year

#33

Post by mrbungie » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 5:37 AM UTC

muzani wrote: post #30

eviks wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other numbers besides 1 and infinity, though

Tracking "revenue" past one financial year is its own accounting hell.

Customers pay Anthropic, in part, so they can figure that one out.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year

#34

Post by csomar » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 5:44 AM UTC

backprop1989 wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year

#35

Post by sometimes_all » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:56 AM UTC

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.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year

#36

Post by ranguna » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 9:39 AM UTC

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.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year

#37

Post by akagusu » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:02 AM UTC

mrbungie wrote: post #29

backprop1989 wrote: post #6

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.

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 s…

> 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.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year

#38

Post by mrbungie » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:56 AM UTC

akagusu wrote: post #37

mrbungie wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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 justific…

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?

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year

#39

Post by vizzah » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:56 AM UTC

Same with OpenAI / ChatGPT. Thieves.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year

#40

Post by yial » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

jkaplowitz wrote: post #22

backprop1989 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> 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…

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.