Sora Goes Paid: OpenAI Starts Charging for AI Video Generations

What changed for Sora users

OpenAI’s Sora is moving away from an unlimited free model. After months of generous access, the app will now prompt users to pay when they exhaust daily free generations. Bill Peebles, Sora’s lead, confirmed the shift and described the previous free tier as 'never sustainable.'

Limits and pricing

Users still receive 30 free videos per day, and Pro subscribers can generate up to 100. Once those thresholds are hit, the new system offers additional packs priced around four dollars for ten extra generations. Peebles also mentioned that these thresholds could be adjusted as demand and usage patterns evolve.

Why monetization makes sense

Rendering photorealistic motion scenes comes with sizable compute costs. Each Sora clip often resembles film-level production values, and maintaining that quality for millions of users is expensive. Turning Sora into a revenue-generating product aligns with OpenAI’s broader goal of making experimental tools financially sustainable.

Growth beyond the US

Sora’s expansion into Southeast Asia — with launches in markets like Thailand and Vietnam — accelerated local interest. Creators and small businesses in these regions are already testing Sora for quick cinematic ads, storytelling, and marketing content, making it a potential revenue driver for OpenAI as adoption scales globally.

Safety and ethical pressure

OpenAI has had to confront misuse risks. Earlier this year the company banned users from generating deepfakes of Martin Luther King Jr. after racist content spread online. Such incidents underscore how fragile the balance is between creative freedom and ethical responsibility when AI video tools become widely accessible.

What this means for creators

The switch from free to paid credits signals a shift from novelty toward an economy of AI content creation. Creators who treated Sora as a sandbox for experimentation may now rethink how often they produce content. For brands and freelancers, it also means factoring generation costs into budgets when choosing AI-driven production workflows.

Final perspective

Sora’s camera keeps rolling, but the spotlight has moved to the bottom line. The platform still democratizes cinematic tools, but with costs now attached, spontaneity may become a premium. Whether that trade-off feels fair depends on how OpenAI balances price, accessibility, and safeguards as Sora matures.