Welcome to the forum!

I also couldn’t find an active similar topic that seemed to cover this exact “credits draining while Codex is idle/ not running” issue.

For billing/credit restoration, I’d recommend contacting the Help Center directly:

https://help.openai.com/en

You may also want to check the Codex rate card, in case it helps with understanding how credits are…

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001106-codex-rate-card

I had no idea this was even updated. This doesn’t seem balanced at all to me