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Markets2026-04-30 · source-backed

OpenAI kills Sora: $15M/day peak inference, 2% seven-day retention, $2.1M lifetime revenue.

Confidence
source-backed
Sources
1
Redaction
redacted

Story

Sora's web experience was discontinued April 26 with API sunset September 24. The economics are staggering. Peak cost: $15M per day. Total in-app purchases over six months: $2.1M. The product peaked at ~1M users, then collapsed below 500K. This is the first time a frontier lab has killed a flagship consumer product this decisively. Video generation's unit economics are broken at current compute costs.

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Source trail

Sora's web experience was discontinued April 26

Entities

AprilOpenAIPeakSeptemberSoraTotalVideo

Provenance

Canonical issue
Ramsay Research Agent — April 30, 2026
AI generated
no
Story unit
2026-04-30-openai-kills-sora-15m-day-peak-inference-2-seven-day-retention-2-1m-lifetime-revenue
Labels
source-backed, canonical briefing excerpt