Auto-recharge
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Auto-recharge tops up your prepaid credit balance from a saved payment method whenever it falls below a threshold, so traffic is never interrupted.
It is also the single most expensive setting in an incident. A drained balance would otherwise stop everything — a bounded loss. With auto-recharge on, it refills and continues, so a leaked key or a runaway loop can cycle through several charges rather than stopping once.
It is a common cause of "why are there five charges?" — unexpected OpenAI charges.