Credit usage ledger frozen since Aug 8, 2026 — 45,252 of 53,000 purchased credits (85.4%) consumed with zero usage records; ongoing

Summary

The Credit Usage Log in Codex → Settings → Analytics stopped recording on 8 August 2026 and has not written a single entry since. Its most recent row today, 18 August, is byte-for-byte identical to what it showed on 16 August: 43 events, all dated 6–8 August, totalling ~7,406 credits.

During those ten days I purchased 43,000 additional credits across seven invoices. All of them were consumed or lost. None produced a single ledger entry.

This is not the documented 1–6 hour analytics delay. The gap is ten days and still growing.

Reconciliation

Invoice	Date	Qty	Ex-VAT	VAT (15%)	Total
8159F611-0024	6 Aug 2026	10,000	$400.00	$60.00	$460.00
8159F611-0025	15 Aug 2026	25,000	$1,000.00	$150.00	$1,150.00
8159F611-0026	15 Aug 2026	7,000	$280.00	$42.00	$322.00
8159F611-0027	15 Aug 2026	2,000	$80.00	$12.00	$92.00
8159F611-0028	15 Aug 2026	7,500	$300.00	$45.00	$345.00
8159F611-0029	17 Aug 2026	500	$20.00	$3.00	$23.00
8159F611-0030	17 Aug 2026	500	$20.00	$3.00	$23.00
8159F611-0031	18 Aug 2026	500	$20.00	$3.00	$23.00
Total		53,000	$2,120.00	$318.00	$2,438.00

Every invoice carries a single line item, Credits, at $0.04 each. All were purchased from Codex → Settings → Usage → Credits.

Purchased .................. 53,000 credits
Documented in usage log ...... 7,406 credits   (43 events, all 6–8 Aug)
Current balance .................. 342 credits
─────────────────────────────────────────────
Unaccounted ................. 45,252 credits   = 85.4%

At the invoiced rate that is $1,810.08 ex-VAT / $2,081.59 including VAT.

The most recent case is the cleanest: 1,500 credits purchased on 17–18 August, balance now 342. 1,158 credits consumed in roughly one day with zero ledger entries.

Environment

• Plan: ChatGPT Pro 20x (active continuously since at least Aug 2025)
• Surfaces in use: Codex desktop (Work), Codex Desktop App, Cloud, web, mobile
• Auto-recharge: never enabled (verified — the settings dialog is an empty setup form with no payment method attached and the Enable button greyed out)
• GitHub account: not linked (the Codex page displays "Your GitHub account is not linked")
• Weekly rate limit: currently 100% consumed

Where the consumption actually goes

The Rounds chart (8,190 rounds over the period) attributes the overwhelming majority to codex-auto-review:

Day	codex-auto-review	gpt-5.6-sol	gpt-5.6-luna	gpt-5.6-terra
4 Aug 2026	1,241	79	9	6
13 Aug 2026	1,284	41	5	5

That is over 95% of all rounds from a process that runs automatically, on an account with no linked repository.

By surface, in the only period the ledger did record (6–8 Aug), the split was:

Surface	Credits	Share
Desktop (Work)	7,143	96.4%
Mobile	156	2.1%
Cloud	45	0.6%
Web	38	0.5%
Desktop App	24	0.3%

Individual Work-desktop events reached 2,219 credits in a single entry, against 0.02–8 credits for the same models on other surfaces.

What support has confirmed in writing

Two statements from OpenAI support, both relevant to this repository rather than to billing:

1. That the credit history views "can lag and may not include some background, sub-agent or tool activity even when it consumes credits."
2. That there is "no public documentation that explains [codex-auto-review's] exact trigger conditions or a supported way to disable it."

The first is an acknowledgement that the metering surface is known to be incomplete. The second means a process consuming >95% of rounds is neither auditable nor controllable from the product UI. (auto_review.policy and approvals_reviewer do exist in the config reference, so the second statement appears to be a documentation gap on the support side rather than a genuine absence.)

Why this looks like a ledger bug, not usage

• The ledger froze on a specific date and has not resumed for ten days, across five different surfaces.
• Purchases made after the freeze produce no entries at all — not partial, not delayed.
• The balance still decrements correctly. So consumption is being metered somewhere; only the user-visible ledger stopped being written.
• Reloading, changing the date range, and re-authenticating do not change the result.

That combination points at a write path from the metering service to the credit-history store, not at unreported-but-real usage.

Related

• #19242 — same signature: credits purchased after the last recorded usage entry, balance dropping to zero, no records. Open, no maintainer response.
• Multiple community reports describing the identical pattern:
  • https://community.openai.com/t/codex-cloud-credits-disappeared-from-analytics/1380355
  • https://community.openai.com/t/codex-chatgpt-credits-disappeared-usage-history-missing-and-support-keeps-giving-ai-generated-loop-responses/1381561
  • https://community.openai.com/t/purchased-codex-credits-seem-to-disappear-far-faster-than-subscription-usage/1388784
  • https://community.openai.com/t/codex-credits-dissappearing/1366891
  • https://community.openai.com/t/title-500-purchased-codex-credits-fell-to-29-68-between-recorded-sessions-support-says-it-cannot-verify-what-consumed-them/1389679
  • https://community.openai.com/t/purchased-1000-credits-gone-in-under-an-hour/1378847

None of these has a maintainer response or a documented resolution.

What would help

1. Confirmation of whether the credit-history write path can silently stop while metering continues, and whether that is what happened here.
2. Whether codex-auto-review consumption is expected to appear in the Credit Usage Log at all, or whether sub-agent activity is excluded by design. If excluded by design, that should be documented, because it makes the ledger unusable for reconciliation.
3. A way to recover or reconstruct the internal ledger for 6–18 August for this account.

I have the full invoice and receipt PDFs for all eight transactions, plus screenshots of the frozen ledger taken 48 hours apart showing identical content. Happy to supply the account identifier privately to anyone who can look it up — the invoice prefix 8159F611 maps to a single Stripe customer record.

Support case reference: 13260716.

Start with the Credit Usage Log and the config-reference entries for auto_review.policy and approvals_reviewer. Compare the ledger's recorded events with the Rounds chart and the documented support statements. Done means establishing whether codex-auto-review activity should appear in the ledger and identifying a reproducible explanation or recovery path for the missing records.