Sora now lets you pay extra to make more AI videos

Keep burning through your video generation allowance on Sora? No problem, OpenAI now lets you buy extra credits to make even more AI videos. That’s good, because the company says it expects to reduce free allowances at some point in the future.

Bill Peebles, who leads the Sora team at OpenAI, said the video platform’s economics are “currently completely unsustainable.” Power users “clearly” aren’t satisfied with the number of free generations they get each day — 100 for users of the higher-end Pro model and 30 for everyone else — so Peebles said OpenAI is going to let creators “get as much usage as they want to pay for.”

Ten extra video generations will cost $4, according to Sora’s listing on Apple App Store, though the number of credits used per video depends on “length, resolution, and other factors,” according to OpenAI’s support page. If you hit your free limit, an option will come up to buy more through the App Store. Credits last for 12 months, and if you want to you can also use them on OpenAI’s coding platform Codex. 

Peebles warned people are going to start hitting that limit sooner in the future. “Eventually we will need to bring the free gens down to accommodate growth,” he said. “In the meantime, enjoy the crazy usage limits.” He didn’t provide details but said OpenAI will “be transparent as it happens.” 

The decision to charge for video gens comes amid a broader push to monetize and scale Sora and cultivate what OpenAI hopes is an emerging AI-powered creator economy. OpenAI has been steadily adding features to achieve this, such as clip stitching and leaderboards for popular videos and cameos, its legally contentious term for a feature that lets users create deepfake avatars of themselves, others, and original characters, which other creators can use in their own videos. 

Sora’s going to pilot monetization for creators “soon,” Peebles said, imagining a “world where rightsholders have the option to charge extra for cameos of beloved characters and people.” The feature has been expected for some time, particularly given the company’s efforts to move on from its original hands-off approach to copyright and likeness, which flooded the platform with questionable depictions of fictional characters like Pikachu and SpongeBob and “disrespectful” deepfake videos of public figures like Martin Luther King Jr.