From Free to Fee: OpenAI to charge users for creating extra Sora AI videos

Sora chief Bill Peebles shared the development on X and said: "We are launching the ability to buy extra gens in sora today. we are doing this for two main reasons."

He said: "First, we have been quite amazed by how much our power users want to use sora, and the economics are currently completely unsustainable. we thought 30 free gens/day would be more than enough, but clearly we were wrong! this will let our pro creators get as much usage as they want to pay for."

He said it is a part of the new Sora economy.

"We imagine a world where rightsholders have the option to charge extra for cameos of beloved characters and people. we will soon pilot monetization, prioritizing people and companies who got onto the platform early. this will also be a way for a new generation of sora creators to make money," he said.

He said: "Eventually we will need to bring the free gens down to accommodate growth (we won't have enough gpus to do it otherwise!), but we’ll be transparent as it happens. in the meantime, enjoy the crazy usage limits."

Peebles said: "Rate limits for everyone are unchanged right now (pro users get 100/day, everyone else gets 30/day). we will need to increase the gens/day used by sora 2 pro to make the economics work out (video models really are expensive!), but we're easing into it."

Meanwhile, technology enthusiasts in Thailand can access the OpenAI Sora 2 feature, giving local social media influencers and other users in the country access to the video tool.

Thailand is one of the first Asian nations to get access to the tool that was initially launched in Canada and the US in early September.

Apart from Thailand, the feature has also been rolled out in Vietnam and Taiwan.

The original Sora model⁠ from February 2024 was in many ways the GPT‑1 moment for video—the first time video generation started to seem like it was working, and simple behaviours like object permanence emerged from scaling up pre-training compute.

Since then, the Sora team has been focused on training models with more advanced world simulation capabilities.