It’s not a moral question at all. They’re credits, they expire, choose to continue to do business with them or not. They don’t owe anyone forever credits.
It costs nothing to maintain the credits, and in fact, the cost of providing the service the credits are for goes down over time (as inference speeds increase).
It is arguable that taking money for a service and then not providing it is immoral and unethical.
Credits that don't expire absolutely cost something -- it makes the financials look worse.
See backprop1989's comment [1] from when this topic was discussed in august 2025:
> 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.
In other words: don’t buy a year’s worth of credits.
Only give us money more frequently, otherwise you might give us too much money, which we’ll happily keep without giving you what you originally paid for.
How often do gift cards lose their balance after 12 months? Seems like a bad deal for consumers.
Yeah, in Australia I believe we have a 3 year minimum on gift cards. Surely in need of some regulation in the software space many saas agreements are extremely punitive towards the consumer and this seems to fit that description too.
If 100% of their customers abandoned them December 7th because they did not like the idea, then it would be bad practice from a financial perspective.
Business is not unilateral, despite what many corporations apparently believe.
It is arguable that taking money for a service and then not providing it is immoral and unethical.
See backprop1989's comment [1] from when this topic was discussed in august 2025:
> 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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44793827
Only give us money more frequently, otherwise you might give us too much money, which we’ll happily keep without giving you what you originally paid for.
How often do gift cards lose their balance after 12 months? Seems like a bad deal for consumers.
Gift cards sometimes used to, but, in the US at least, the federal government and various states passed rules limiting expiration.
Maybe that'll be the ultimate outcome here.