Checked 21 August 2026. Sora 2 is no longer a product you can sign up for at any price. OpenAI discontinued the Sora web and app experiences on 26 April 2026, and the remaining developer API —
#f4f4f5] px-1.5 py-0.5 text-sm font-mono font-medium text-[#7d6cea]">sora-2andsora-2-pro— is scheduled for removal on 24 September 2026, per [OpenAI's own deprecations page. Almost every "Sora 2 free" article still online was written before that and is wrong.
No. Sora 2 is not free, and as of 26 April 2026 it is not paid either — OpenAI shut the consumer app and website down entirely. The only Sora 2 access left is the developer Videos API, which is billed per second and is itself scheduled for removal on 24 September 2026. If you are looking for a free way to generate AI video today, the answer is a different tool, not a different Sora plan.
Is Sora 2 Free in 2026?
Sora 2 has no free tier because Sora 2 has no tier at all any more. The sequence, dated:
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| Sept–Oct 2025 | Sora 2 launches, invite-code gated, US and Canada first |
| Nov 2025 | Invite requirement dropped for US, Canada, Japan, South Korea |
| Jan 2026 | Free video generation withdrawn; Plus and Pro subscribers only |
| 24 Mar 2026 | OpenAI announces deprecation of the Videos API and all sora-2 models |
| 26 Apr 2026 | Sora web and app experiences discontinued |
| 24 Sept 2026 | sora-2, sora-2-pro and the Videos API removed |
The two shutdown dates are the ones that matter, and the API date is confirmed on OpenAI's deprecations page, which lists sora-2, sora-2-pro, sora-2-2025-10-06, sora-2-2025-12-08 and sora-2-pro-2025-10-06 with a shutdown date of 2026-09-24 and — notably — no recommended replacement model.
What About the Free Tier That Used to Exist?
Before January 2026 there was a genuine free tier: short clips at 480p, hard daily caps, and a visible watermark on every export. It was withdrawn first, several months ahead of the wider shutdown, leaving Sora 2 as a subscriber-only feature of ChatGPT Plus at $20/month and Pro at $200/month. Only Pro accounts could export without the mandatory watermark.
None of that is available now. If you find a page offering "free Sora 2 credits" or a "free Sora 2 generator", you are looking at either a stale article or a reseller wrapping some other model in Sora branding.
The One Thing You Can Still Pay For (Until 24 September)
The Videos API still answers requests as this is written, and it is metered per second of output rather than by subscription:
| Model | Resolution | Price per second | 10-second clip |
|---|---|---|---|
sora-2 | 720p | $0.10 | $1.00 |
sora-2-pro | 720p | $0.30 | $3.00 |
sora-2-pro | 1024p | $0.50 | $5.00 |
sora-2-pro | 1080p | $0.70 | $7.00 |
Rates as published by API aggregators tracking OpenAI's Videos API in August 2026; confirm against your own billing dashboard, since this endpoint is in its deprecation window and pricing on deprecated endpoints is not maintained.
Building anything on this now means building on an endpoint with a published removal date roughly a month away. It is the wrong foundation for a workflow you intend to keep.
What Happened to Videos People Already Made
Exports ran through a sunset page at sora.chatgpt.com/sunset, which produced a ZIP of videos, prompts and metadata on request. That window closed with the consumer shutdown in April. Content that was never exported is gone. Anything you did download stays yours under the licence you generated it under.
What Is Actually Free for AI Video Right Now
This is the question most people asking "is Sora 2 free" are really asking. Honest state of play, verified August 2026:
| Tool | Free access | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Higgsfield AI | ~10 credits/day, roughly two short generations | Watermarked, flagship models locked — see our breakdown |
| Grok Imagine | Free tier tied to an X account | Short clips, limited control — see the guide |
| Google Veo (via free surfaces) | Limited daily generations | Regional availability varies |
| Wan 2.1 / 2.2 | Fully free if you self-host | Open weights under Apache 2.0, but you supply the GPU — see Wan 2.5 |
| Creetr | Free plan, no watermark on export | Built for ad creative, not general-purpose video |
The genuinely free-forever option is self-hosting an open-weights model. Everything else is a trial in one shape or another, and — as Sora 2 just demonstrated — a hosted free tier can be withdrawn on a few weeks' notice.
The Lesson Worth Taking From the Sora Shutdown
Sora 2 went from launch to complete removal in under twelve months. If your ad production depends on one vendor's flagship model, you inherit that vendor's roadmap risk. The practical hedge is to keep the workflow — hook, script, actor, captions, cut — separate from whichever generation model is currently best, so swapping models is a settings change rather than a rebuild. That is the difference between a raw model and an ad tool, and it is covered in more depth in the AI video generator buyer's guide.
If You Came Here to Make an Ad
Raw video models — Sora 2 included, when it existed — output clips. They do not output ads. A UGC ad needs a hook in the first three seconds, a script that survives being watched on mute, an actor who reads as a real person, captions, and a cut that holds attention to the CTA. Creetr takes a product link and returns that finished ad on a free plan, without a watermark, and without depending on any single model staying alive. If you want to write the hook first, the video hook generator is free and needs no signup.