If Sora has stopped working for you, nothing is broken at your end. OpenAI is discontinuing it.
The dates that matter
- 24 March 2026 — shutdown announced.
- 26 April 2026 — sora.com and the iOS and Android apps discontinued. This is already done.
- 24 September 2026 — the API stops. All generation through Sora 2 and Sora 2 Pro endpoints ends.
If you have anything calling those endpoints in production, that is your deadline and it is close.
Export your work first
Do this before reading the rest of the page. Data associated with Sora accounts is permanently deleted after the cutoff dates. Not archived, not downgraded — deleted.
If there is anything in that account you would miss, export it now rather than at the deadline, when everybody else will be doing the same thing.
Why it died, and why that should shape what you pick next
This part is worth understanding rather than skipping, because it tells you what to look for in a replacement.
Sora was reportedly burning in the region of a million dollars a day in compute. Video generation is dramatically more expensive to serve than text or images — not a little more, an order of magnitude more. Meanwhile usage peaked around a million monthly actives and had fallen below half that by the time the announcement came. Expensive to run, and shrinking.
OpenAI moved the research team to world simulation work tied to robotics, and the shutdown also ended a billion-dollar Disney partnership that would have licensed characters into the product.
The lesson for anyone choosing a replacement: ask who is paying for the inference. A frontier video model offered cheaply or unlimited is being subsidised by somebody, and subsidies are decisions that get reversed. Sora is not the last video product to be withdrawn for costing more to run than it earned — it is the most prominent one so far.
That is not an argument for paranoia. It is an argument for not building anything you cannot move.
Where to go, by what you were actually doing
You were calling the API from code
Go to an API aggregator — a service reselling many models behind one key. Two advantages beyond simply replacing what you lost: you can switch models by changing a string rather than an integration, and you get visible per-second pricing instead of an opaque plan.
The practical destination for most people is ByteDance’s Seedance family, which is the strongest available video model line right now and has a tier structure that goes from premium down to very cheap. A five-second clip runs from about $0.42 on the top tier to roughly $0.06 on the cheapest, which is considerably less than Sora cost anyone.
Migration is not painless — prompt behaviour differs between models and your prompts will need retuning — but the shape of the integration is the same, and moving now beats moving on 23 September.
You were using the app to make videos by hand
The apps are already gone, so you have probably found something. If you are still looking, the honest split is between generation platforms with a proper interface — camera controls, presets, a timeline — and editors that have generation bolted on. The first group costs several times more per second and is worth it if you are not going to write code, because the alternative is not cheaper for you, it is unavailable.
Be aware that availability is regional. The consumer routes to the leading models rolled out market by market and remain uneven, so a tool your favourite tutorial recommends may simply not offer the same features where you are.
You were on the free tier, experimenting
There is no free frontier video model, for the reason the rest of this page is about. What exists is trial credits, promotional windows on newer platforms buying users, and generation bundled into subscriptions you may already hold — a stock library subscription, for instance, may include a video generator you have not noticed.
If the requirement is genuinely “a lot of video for nearly nothing”, the answer is the cheapest API tier rather than any free plan. At around six cents for five seconds, the cheap tiers are close enough to free for most experimenting, and they do not expire.
What this cost people, and how to not repeat it
Sora launched and was withdrawn inside a year. Anyone who built a workflow, an audience or a product on top of it has spent this year moving.
The defensive version is not avoiding new tools — that costs more than it saves. It is keeping the expensive, slow-to-rebuild parts of your workflow in things you control, and treating the model itself as swappable. If your pipeline calls one endpoint and everything else is yours, a shutdown is an afternoon. If the platform is your pipeline, a shutdown is a quarter.
That difference is the whole argument for API routes over all-in-one platforms, and it just got demonstrated at scale.
Checked
August 2026, against OpenAI’s own discontinuation notice. The September API date is the one to diary.
Part of our AI video tools comparison — three categories, priced, and which one you are actually shopping in.
