OpenAI Said Sorry With A Usage Reset. Some Paying Users Say It Never Arrived.
OpenAI product lead Tibo promised every paid ChatGPT account a reset at 10 AM Pacific on October 2 to make up for GPT 6.1 Sol crawling through its first two days. Business and Pro 500 users say their meters didn't move, and support told one of them to buy credits.
A sand clock, shown for illustration. Photo: Gianluca Miscione, CC BY SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
When a new model launches slow, the usual move is to say sorry and hand out something free. OpenAI did exactly that this week. The trouble is that some of the people paying the most say the free thing never showed up.
The apology
GPT 6.1 Sol came out on September 29. At 7:14 PM Pacific on Thursday, October 1, Tibo, the OpenAI product lead who goes by @thsottiaux on X, posted this: "Global reset landing tomorrow 10am PST for all paid ChatGPT accounts. Apologies for the slow start with GPT-6.1 Sol, it's now back to running at expected speeds after the massive load spike in the first two days."
So OpenAI's own explanation is that the model was slow because too many people hit it at once, and the fix for everyone who burned time and usage on a sluggish model was to refill their meters.
Where's the reset?
By lunchtime on Friday, people on r/ChatGPT were already asking "anyone get the promised reset?" One user posted that they "FINALLY got the reset after 4 hours." Others never got it at all.
A ChatGPT Business user on r/OpenAI wrote that evening that their account was "still sitting at 0%" and that "the reset date and time shown in codex is literally still the old one from before the announcement." They say they contacted support and were told the post may have meant a "banked reset," that promotional resets go out through bulk campaigns, that support can't disclose who qualifies or add one by hand, and that they could buy credits if they needed more usage. The user said it was the third time this year that Business accounts had missed a reset like this.
Another Business user on r/ChatGPT said the reset landed on their personal account but not on their team's. And on r/codex, a Pro 500 subscriber said their usage didn't reset at all. Instead, they wrote, "it moved my weekly reset to tomorrow," which left them stuck at zero for longer than before.
And the model itself
The complaints don't stop at the meter. One r/codex user said they gave the new model "a fair shot over the past few days" and called it "painfully slow," adding that they had to write three to five follow up prompts to fix its mistakes. On r/ChatGPT, someone wrote that Sol 6.1 max "keeps working" on their app overnight, about 8 hours, and was on the same screen in the morning. When they asked it to resume, "it just does nothing."
And early Saturday, a Pro subscriber on the $100 plan posted that one simple round of fixes in Codex took 18 percent of their usage, on the kind of task that "would barely put a dent in my usage" all week.
If you were promised a reset and your meter didn't move, screenshot the usage screen and the reset date before you contact support. OpenAI's announcement said all paid accounts. Hold them to it.
Sources: Tibo on X, October 1; r/ChatGPT, October 2; r/ChatGPT, October 2; r/OpenAI, October 2; r/ChatGPT, October 2; r/codex, October 2; r/codex, October 2; r/ChatGPT, October 2; r/codex, October 3.