ChatGPT Plus 1-month free trial: “Payment was not approved”

I'm trying to activate the ChatGPT Plus 1-month free trial (plus-1-month-free), but every payment method I've tried fails.

I've tried:

• RedotPay Visa/debit
• RedotPay with $21.50+ available
• my brother's Wise card
• Apple Pay
• PayPal
• different browsers/checkouts
• different billing adresses/ different VPN locations

The interesting part is that I captured the failure in DevTools/HAR and it doesn't look like a normal bank decline.

On one attempt ChatGPT called:

POST /backend-api/payments/checkout/approve

and OpenAI returned:

{"result":"blocked"}

The frontend telemetry showed:

checkout.confirm_approval_failure
requires_manual_approval=true
approval_result=blocked

That attempt seems to stop before Stripe even reaches normal card authorization/3DS/the issuer.

On another checkout flow, Stripe successfully created the payment credentials/ConfirmationToken, but then ChatGPT called:

POST /backend-api/payments/checkout/confirm

and got:

{"status":"blocked"}

So I'm increasingly convinced the issue is OpenAI's free-trial/manual-approval system rather than “my prepaid/virtual card is unsupported.”

The promotion itself definitely appears in my account, successfully applies a 100% first-month discount, and checkout then fails at the approval stage.

I've also seen OpenAI Community reports from 2026 of people getting the same “Payment was not approved” / “Payment approval blocked” issue with multiple cards/payment methods, and OpenAI Support apparently asked affected users for HAR files.

Has anyone with this specific free-trial approval problem actually fixed it?

Especially interested in people who:

• saw approval_result=blocked or status=blocked
• contacted OpenAI Support
• had Support reset/fix something account-side
• eventually successfully claimed the free month

If yours eventually worked, what exactly changed?

I'm not looking for generic “call your bank” suggestions unless your bank was actually receiving and declining the authorization. My captured failure appears to happen before that stage.