Hey there, I just started the AI Engineering course and was running into a 429 error saying that I had hit my quota, even though I had just made a new OpenAI account.
Apparently, as of mid-2025, OpenAI have stopped giving free credits upon signup.
I am unable to do the exercises in the course, which is a shame. I’d love to get hands-on doing the course.
Is there a workaround, or will I have to pay for OpenAI usage?
Hey @Orbiccode, unfortunately there’s no workaround from my knowledge for this. We’re discussing how to update our course to use maybe an open source option. You’ll need to top up the minimum to access OpenAI’s API. If you do I recommend using a smaller model so it’s not expensive in terms of credits. You can compare models here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/compare
There is a way around this:
Vercel offers $5 free credits per month for its AI gateway, which has also access to the OpenAI models among others. It is also compatible with the OpenAI SDK
So you can just
- use the Vercel API key in place of the OpenAI API key
- use the Vercel Base URL
https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1/ in place of the Open AI Base URL `https://api.openai.com/v1`
Interesting! Thanks for the info @Bugdeveloper