When do cloud and AI credits expire?

Expiry is the single biggest driver of what unused credits are worth, and it is also the thing people most often get wrong about their own balance. Not because the information is hidden, but because providers show you an aggregate figure while the underlying grants expire on different dates.

This guide covers where to find the real date on each platform. It deliberately does not give you a number of months per provider, because grants issued under different programmes on the same platform routinely carry different terms — a figure quoted here would be wrong for someone.

Why the headline number misleads

Credits arrive in batches. A startup might receive an initial grant, a second tranche on hitting a milestone, and a one-off from an event, all sitting in the same account. The console adds them up. The expiries do not merge.

So a $40,000 balance can be $35,000 expiring in six weeks and $5,000 with a year left. Those are very different assets, and a buyer will price them very differently. Always read expiry per credit line, never in aggregate.

Where to look, by provider

Provider	Where the expiry lives
AWS	Billing and Cost Management console → Credits. One row per credit, each with its own expiry and applicable services.
Azure	Azure portal → Cost Management + Billing → Credits, against the billing profile. Visual Studio credits live in the Visual Studio subscriber portal instead.
Google Cloud	Cloud Console → Billing → Credits. Read the scope column alongside the date — a scoped credit is narrower than it looks.
OpenAI	platform.openai.com → Settings → Organization → Billing, showing the credit balance and any expiry.
Anthropic	console.anthropic.com → Plans and Billing, showing the organisation's credit balance.

In every case, note four things per line, not one: the programme it came from, the remaining balance, the expiry date, and what it can be spent on.

The provider-specific traps

AWS. Activate grants commonly exclude AWS Marketplace, Reserved Instance upfront fees and Savings Plans. A credit that expires in a year but cannot touch the spend a buyer actually has is not as valuable as the date suggests. Treat the date as fixed, too: AWS states it cannot extend the expiration date on credits, unused balance included, so unused credit is forfeited when the date passes rather than rolling anywhere.

Azure. The kind of credit matters more here than anywhere else. The monthly Azure credit on a Visual Studio subscription is licensed to you personally for development and testing, and is not transferable. Microsoft also publishes the rhythm plainly: the monthly credit resets each month with no pooling and no rollover, spending stops until the reset once the month's allowance is used, and if the subscription lapses unused credit is not carried over. If that is your balance, expiry is academic — there is nothing to sell.

Google Cloud. Credits carry a scope as well as a date. A credit restricted to particular services, SKUs or regions can only offset spend of that same shape, which narrows the pool of buyers sharply regardless of how long is left. If what you hold is the free-trial welcome credit, Google's terms settle it quickly: 90 days from the trial start, no pausing and no extending, and upgrading to a paid billing account does not restart the clock — you simply keep the unused portion until those original 90 days run out.

OpenAI and Anthropic. Prepaid API credit sits against an organisation, and so do the rate limits and model access. A long expiry does not help a buyer whose workload needs more throughput than the organisation's usage tier allows.

For OpenAI specifically there is a published rule worth knowing before you plan around a balance: OpenAI states that purchased prepaid credits expire one year after the date of purchase, and that it cannot extend the expiry on purchased credits or on credit grants. Free and promotional grants carry their own dates against the grant rather than following that one-year rule. Separately, OpenAI's Service Credit Terms prohibit sales and transfers of service credits, so on that balance the expiry date is often the less important of the two constraints.

Anthropic publishes the same shape of rule. Its Credit Terms put usage credits at one calendar year from the date they are issued, with promotional credits expiring at whatever time was stated when granted and otherwise after a year. They also say plainly that credits may not be transferred or sold to any other person or entity and may only be used by the holder of the account they are attached to. One detail catches people mid-wind-down: credits expire automatically if you close the Anthropic account, so closing the organisation to tidy up destroys the balance rather than freeing it.

What expiry does to value

The mechanism is simple: a buyer can only realise value by consuming the balance before it lapses, and moving a real workload takes time. Migration planning, testing, cutover and monitoring do not happen in a fortnight.

So the practical question is not "how long until expiry" but "how much of this could a buyer plausibly consume in that window". A large balance with a short runway fails that test no matter how attractive the discount, which is why short-dated credits often cannot be placed at all rather than simply selling cheaply.

If your credits are close to expiry

Some honest options that do not involve selling:

• Bring forward your own spend. Pull planned work into the window: backfills, reprocessing, batch training, load testing, migrations you were going to do anyway.
• Ask the provider. Extensions are not routine, but for a substantial balance an account manager may have room to move, especially if you are on a growth trajectory they care about. It costs one email.
• Accept the loss and plan better. Sometimes this is the right answer, and it is cheaper than a rushed deal with a counterparty you have not checked out.

If you do want to explore a sale, do it early rather than in the last fortnight. The time pressure that makes you want to move fast is exactly what makes a deal dangerous.

Related reading

• Are AWS credits transferable? — the terms, and the arrangements people use instead
• How to value unused cloud credits — what buyers actually price on
• A buyer's risk checklist — what to confirm before paying
• Provider pages: AWS, Azure, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Cloud