When do cloud and AI credits expire?
Where to find the real expiry date on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OpenAI and Anthropic, and why one headline balance often hides several different dates.
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.
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, is not transferable, and typically does not roll over month to month. 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.
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.
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