OpenAI has been somewhat quietly running a promotion where you can get a very generous daily allotment of free tokens (like more than most people would ever hope to use in a day) for most of their models (o1, o3, gpt4o, gpt4.1 and others). There are some caveats though:

• You have to agree to share your data with them and let them train their models off of your API calls.

• To use o3 over the API you have to verify your identity by taking a picture of your photo ID and then doing a biometric scan of your face (sounds like a lot, but it actually only takes about 5min)

• You only get access to the models over the API, not the tools that come with them in the ChatGPT app. So o3 or o4-mini over the API won’t have access to the web searching functionality that they have in ChatGPT app. The models are just as intelligent, but if you want them to be able to search the web to answer all questions the way the in-app versions do you’ll need to roll your own web searching tools and provide them access to them.

Using o3, this comes out to ~$10USD worth of free tokens per day, which seems like a pretty good deal for most people, especially given how expensive models like o3 can be otherwise. You can even use them to use o3 for free in Cursor!

Here’s how to get it set up:

1. Log in at platform.openai.com and select your org (top-left).

2. Go to Settings → Data Controls → Sharing and flip “Enable sharing prompts and completions with OpenAI” to Enabled.

3. If you’re eligible, it’ll say: “You’re enrolled for complimentary daily tokens.”

4. That’s it—any usage on the listed models will automatically draw from your free-token pool.

However to use o3 over the API you’ll also have to do a separate photo ID verification step before their /models endpoint will include o3. Here’s how to do that:

1. Visit your org’s settings

   Go to https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/general

2. Click “Verify Organization”

   You’ll be prompted to upload a government-issued ID. Then you’ll be forwarded to a separate identity provider website that’ll ask you to look into your phone’s camera so they can verify that your biometrics match the photo ID, and you’re done.

You should be able to use o3 and all the other included models for free after that.

If you want a normal chat interface to talk to the models I’d recommend spinning up either Open Web UI (requires you to have your own VPS or home server to run it on, but is very polished and slick) or Prompta and paste in your API key and the standard OpenAI base URL (https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions).

Here’s the full list of models that are included in the free access deal:

1 Million token group (250 K for usage Tiers 1–2):

• gpt-4.5-preview-2025-02-27

• gpt-4.1-2025-04-14

• gpt-4o-2024-05-13

• gpt-4o-2024-08-06

• gpt-4o-2024-11-20

• o3-2025-04-16

• o1-preview-2024-09-12

• o1-2024-12-17

10 Million token group (2.5 M for usage Tiers 1–2):

• gpt-4.1-mini-2025-04-14

• gpt-4.1-nano-2025-04-14

• gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18

• o4-mini-2025-04-16

• o1-mini-2024-09-12

• o3-mini-2025-01-31

And if you want to check how many tokens you’ve used, you can look in the Chat‐Completions Usage dashboard by going to https://platform.openai.com/usage/chat-completions.

From there:

1. Enable both the Input Tokens and Output Tokens toggles at the top.

2. In the upper right “Group by” dropdown, select Service tier.

3. You’ll now see separate lines labeled:

   • Data sharing incentive tier – Input Tokens

   • Data sharing incentive tier – Output Tokens

     Those two together equals how many free tokens you’ve burned so far.

PS You can also use these tokens in Cursor for free, just go to Cursor settings and put in your API key. o3 is really smart in Cursor, but be warned it burns through tokens very quickly with all the reasoning it does.