OpenAI Shuts Down Sora: $15M/Day at Peak, 2% Seven-Day Retention, $2.1M Lifetime Revenue
OpenAI·high signal
Sora's web and app experiences were discontinued April 26, with API sunset on September 24. The economics were catastrophic: peak inference costs reached $15M/day against just $2.1M in total lifetime in-app purchases over six months. Seven-day retention was 2%, thirty-day retention was 1%. The product peaked at ~1M users before collapsing below 500K. OpenAI is the first major AI lab to kill a flagship consumer product this decisively — a data point on the unit economics of video generation.