Is Sora Still Usable? The App Died April 26 — the API Has 31 Days Left, and the Replacement Column Is Blank

If you are searching for whether Sora still works, the answer is no — and it has not worked for four months.

The confusion is structural: the shutdown was split into two stages five months apart. Plenty of people remember “it closes in September” without realising their half already closed.

Which half are you in?

So if you are a regular user, the date you were waiting for has already passed. Only the developer-facing API is still counting down.

Read directly today: six Sora entries, replacement column empty

We read the official OpenAI deprecations page directly on 2026-08-24. The notice reads:

On March 24th, 2026, we notified developers using the Videos API and Sora 2 video generation model aliases and snapshots of their deprecation and removal from the API on September 24, 2026.

The page lists six Sora-related entries, all shutting down the same day:

That empty column is the story. Other deprecated entries on the same table do name a successor — ft-gpt-3.5-turbo maps to gpt-5.6-terra, ft-gpt-4 maps to gpt-5.6-sol. Only these six Sora rows are blank all the way down.

It is not an oversight. OpenAI is not carrying video generation forward. If you want to keep generating video, you have to leave.

Why it was killed

The closure was announced on 2026-03-24, less than six months after launch. The public line at the time, as reported by Euronews on 2026-03-25:

What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.

Coverage attributed the decision to deepfake and copyright controversy plus a pivot toward coding tools and enterprise customers. Worth noting: three months before the shutdown was announced, Disney had signed a three-year deal letting Sora generate video with over 200 licensed characters. Disney later said it respected the decision to exit the video generation business.

Are your old videos still there?

The Decoder reported on 2026-03-28, citing OpenAI, that videos and images could be exported directly from the Sora library, and that user data is permanently deleted once all the deadlines pass. At the time OpenAI had “not decided yet whether there will be a final export window after those dates.”

We could not find any official follow-up announcing a rescue export path. Per our verification rules, not finding something is not proof it does not exist — but do not assume it does. If you still have an unhandled Sora account, do not bank on recovering anything later.

One caveat about stale data

Our own historical record for Sora still carries a “bundled with ChatGPT Plus, US$20/month” plan entry. That is a historical value, not something you can buy today. Sora was never a standalone subscription — it was a feature inside a ChatGPT subscription. ChatGPT Plus is still a live subscription; it just no longer contains Sora. There is no such thing as cancelling Sora separately.

As for refunds on charges already made: we could not read the official pages today (openai.com and help.openai.com both return 403 to our requests), so we mark that unverified and will not estimate it.

Filling in the column OpenAI left blank

Every price below comes from our own verification records, with the last-verified date in brackets. Monthly list prices are labelled as monthly — we do not pass annual-averaged figures off as monthly rates:

Matching them to needs:

• If you need an API (you were on the Videos API): Runway and Luma have clear paid tiers and credit systems and are the closest swap; Veo runs through Google AI Studio and Flow.
• If you need a web UI (you were on sora.chatgpt.com): Kling and Pika are fastest to pick up, and their free allowances are genuinely usable for a trial.

Three traps when picking a replacement

These came up repeatedly across our video-tool verifications — not at one vendor, at several:

1. Annual-averaged prices posing as monthly list prices. The US$8 Pika shows by default is the annual rate divided by twelve; the real monthly price is US$10. Check which tab you are on before believing a nice number.
2. Free credits that are one-time, not monthly. Runway’s 125 credits officially never expire — but they also never reset. Descript’s free 100 credits are likewise marked one-time. That is a completely different thing from Pika’s 80 credits resetting every month.
3. Prices really do lurch. On 2026-08-22 we ran two browser reads against Magic Hour and recorded the Creator monthly list price moving from a previous US$15 to US$615, with credits raised sharply at the same time. The magnitude is unusual enough that we record it as observed but suggest you confirm it yourself rather than copying it.

What we would do

• Regular users: this road is closed; there is nothing to wait for in September. Start on the free allowance at Kling or Pika and only pay once something feels right.
• Developers: replace every sora-2 call before 09-24. No official replacement means no painless migration path, so give yourself more time than you think you need.
• Anyone with an unhandled Sora account: assume the data is already unrecoverable rather than planning around a future export window.

Verified 2026-08-24. The authoritative notice is the OpenAI deprecations page. For the other six second-half shutdown deadlines, including the Assistants API on 08-26, see our OpenAI shutdown deadline table. For pricing traps across video tools, see the fake price cuts in AI video tools, and for per-tool allowances see the Runway, Kling, Pika and Veo pages.