This page is about the card and fiat side, and about refunds. If your payment was crypto and confirmed on-chain but never credited, that is a structurally different problem with its own recovery path, covered in our separate guide on crypto payments that never credit.
Verified on 10 August 2026. Card network and bank timelines vary by issuer and country, so treat every duration here as typical rather than guaranteed. ROZO Checkout is an independent third-party checkout and is not affiliated with OpenRouter or Coinbase.
First, work out whether you were actually charged
The most common version of this problem is not a missing payment at all. It is a pending authorisation that looks identical to a charge in your banking app.
When a checkout attempts a card payment, the issuer places a hold on the funds. Your available balance drops immediately and a line appears in your transaction list. That line is an authorisation, not a settled charge. If the checkout then fails for any reason, the authorisation is never captured, and the hold expires on its own. Nothing is ever taken, but nothing is refunded either, because there was nothing to refund.
How to tell the difference:
- A pending authorisation is usually greyed out, labelled "pending", "processing", or "authorised", and does not appear on your monthly statement.
- A settled charge is posted, appears in your statement, and has a final settlement date.
- Available balance drops for both. Only settled charges reduce your statement balance.
Typical hold release times are three to seven days for debit cards and up to thirty days for some credit cards, depending on the issuer. Card networks set outer limits, but the issuer decides how quickly it drops a stale hold, and neither you nor the merchant can force it earlier. Support cannot release a hold that was never captured, because from the merchant's side the transaction simply does not exist.
If you retried the payment several times, expect several pending lines. That is not several charges. Wait for the statement before counting money as lost.
The settled charge with no credits, and the partial credit
If the charge has posted to your statement and your credit balance did not move, you are in genuinely broken territory and it is worth escalating.
What usually happened is that payment capture and credit provisioning are two separate steps. The payment processor captured the funds and returned success, and the step that writes credits to your account failed, timed out, or was never triggered because the browser session ended before the redirect completed. The money is real, the account update is missing, and a human generally has to reconcile it.
A related pattern we see reported repeatedly is a partial credit: the amount debited is noticeably larger than the credits applied. Before assuming an error, check the fee structure. OpenRouter charges 5.5% with an $0.80 minimum on card and AliPay payments, and 5% on its own crypto path. On a small top-up the minimum fee dominates, so a few dollars debited can produce visibly fewer dollars of credit. A card issuer may also add a foreign transaction fee or convert at its own rate, which widens the gap further without anyone doing anything wrong.
If the gap is far larger than fees explain, or if a charge appeared that you did not initiate at all, do not retry and do not immediately open a chargeback. Collect evidence first: the statement line with merchant descriptor, date and time in UTC, last four digits of the card, the amount debited, and the credit balance before and after. Then escalate in writing. A charge you genuinely did not authorise should also be reported to your bank, separately from the merchant conversation, because only the bank can block the card.
Duplicate charges after retrying
Retrying a failing checkout is the natural reflex and it is the main way people end up with duplicates. Each attempt creates its own authorisation. Most fail and expire harmlessly, but if two attempts capture, you have two real charges and only one of them produced credits.
There is also a risk-control side effect. Repeated failed attempts in a short window look like card testing to fraud systems, and both the issuer and the merchant's processor may start refusing you specifically. Users report hitting rate limits described as too many top-up attempts after a handful of tries, which then blocks even a payment method that would have worked.
A safer sequence:
- Attempt the payment once and let it finish. If the page hangs, wait at least a minute before touching anything, and do not refresh mid-redirect.
- Check your credit balance in a separate tab before deciding it failed. Credits sometimes land after the browser has already given up.
- Check your banking app for a pending line. If a hold exists, the attempt reached your bank, and retrying immediately will most likely produce a second hold rather than a success.
- If it truly failed, wait a few hours before the next attempt, and change something meaningful — a different card, a different funding route — rather than repeating the identical attempt.
- If two charges have posted, request a refund of the duplicate in writing rather than filing a dispute first. Duplicates are the easiest category for a merchant to verify and refund, because their own records show two captures against one account.
Refund timelines, and why yours may look stuck
A refund has three stages, and only the first is under the merchant's control.
First, the merchant approves and submits the refund to its payment processor. This is the stage where support tickets matter, and where a slow queue can hold things up for days. Second, the processor transmits the refund to the card network. This is usually quick. Third, your issuing bank posts the credit to your account, and this stage is invisible to everyone but your bank. Five to ten business days is a normal total. Some issuers, particularly for debit cards and in some countries, routinely take longer, and cross-border refunds add time.
That means a refund can be genuinely complete on the merchant's side and still absent from your account. So the first question to ask support is not "where is my money" but "has the refund been submitted, and what is the acquirer reference number or refund ID". With that reference, your bank can trace it. Without it, your bank can only tell you it has not arrived, which you already know.
When a refund passes roughly twenty days with no reference number and no substantive reply, you have stopped waiting on a bank and started waiting on a queue. At that point escalate: reply on the existing ticket rather than opening new ones, state the elapsed time plainly, and ask specifically for the submission date and reference. Opening several parallel tickets usually pushes you back down the queue rather than up it.
One category is not refundable at all: crypto purchases are non-refundable once completed, on OpenRouter's own crypto path as well as generally. If you paid in crypto, refund is not the mechanism, and asking for one wastes a support cycle.
A support message template you can copy
Support replies faster to messages that contain everything needed to act. Vague reports get routed to a bot; specific ones get routed to a human. Fill in the brackets and delete lines that do not apply.
"Subject: Charge posted, credits not applied — [date of charge, UTC]
Account email: [email on the OpenRouter account]
What happened: On [date and approximate time in UTC] I purchased credits using a [card type / payment method]. The charge has posted to my statement, but my credit balance did not change (or: only part of the amount was applied).
Payment details: - Amount debited: [amount and currency] - Merchant descriptor on my statement: [exact text] - Last four digits of card: [nnnn] - Charge status: posted / settled (not pending) - Credit balance immediately before: [amount] - Credit balance now: [amount] - Number of attempts I made: [n] — [n] of these show as pending holds
What I have already checked: I confirmed the charge is settled rather than a pending authorisation, and I have not filed a dispute with my bank.
What I am asking for: please either apply the missing credits or refund the charge. If a refund is issued, please send me the refund submission date and the acquirer reference number so my bank can trace it."
Send once, then wait. Add a short follow-up on the same thread if there is no substantive reply after a week, and again at roughly three weeks. Keep every reply on one thread — a single ageing ticket is stronger evidence of delay than five fresh ones.
Chargebacks: the last resort, and what it costs you
A chargeback is a formal dispute filed with your bank, which forcibly pulls the funds back from the merchant. It works, and it is a real consumer protection, but it is not a faster refund button and it has consequences worth understanding before you use it.
When a chargeback is filed, the merchant is debited the amount plus a dispute fee, and the dispute is recorded against their account. Many API and credits providers treat a chargeback as a fraud signal and close or suspend the associated account, sometimes permanently, including any remaining credit balance. If your goal is to keep using the service, a chargeback can end that relationship even if you win. It is also slow — investigations commonly run thirty to ninety days — so it is rarely quicker than simply escalating a stuck refund.
A reasonable order of escalation:
- Contact support with the details above and give them a fair window, typically one to two weeks for a first substantive reply.
- Escalate on the same thread with the elapsed time and a specific ask (submit the refund, or provide the reference number).
- If a refund was submitted but has not landed, take the reference number to your bank and ask them to trace it. This is not a dispute and carries no penalty.
- Consider a chargeback only for charges you genuinely did not authorise, or where the merchant has stopped responding entirely over a long period, and accept that account closure is a plausible outcome.
On prevention: most of these cases start with a card path that was already struggling. If your card repeatedly fails or your bank keeps blocking the merchant, moving to a route that either settles or clearly does not — rather than half-settling — removes the whole category. That is the design goal behind ROZO Checkout, which is currently charging no service fee while we validate the product, and which is independent of OpenRouter and Coinbase. It does not recover a charge that already went missing; nothing outside the merchant and your bank can do that.