Sora app: What OpenAI’s video app was, why it shut down and what to use now

Plans, prices and features checked on the official pages on October 29, 2026.

The Sora app is no longer available. OpenAI announced on March 24, 2026 that it was shutting Sora down, and according to OpenAI’s help center the web and app experiences ended on April 26, 2026, with the API scheduled to end on September 24, 2026. Both dates have passed, so there is no official way to use Sora today, and no invite code or login will bring it back.

This guide explains what the Sora app was, how it worked, why the watermark mattered, what happened to it, and which tools people use instead.

What the Sora app was and who made it

Sora is a text-to-video system made by OpenAI. OpenAI unveiled the first Sora in 2024. In September 2025 it released a second-generation model, Sora 2, together with a standalone social video app, according to NBC News.

The app let people type a prompt, or start from an image, and get a short generated video with sound. Videos went into a feed that other users could browse and remix, which made it closer to a social network than to a plain generator. The app became the most-downloaded app in the iOS Photo and Video category within a day of release, NBC reported.

So the answers to the basic questions are simple. OpenAI made and owned Sora, the app launched in the autumn of 2025, and the company has since discontinued it.

How Sora worked: Prompts, cameos and realistic output

Sora belongs to the family of diffusion video models, which start from noise and refine it into frames that match a text description. Our explainer on latent video diffusion covers the mechanics. The realism came from training on very large amounts of video and from generating the clip as a whole, so objects and motion stay consistent from frame to frame.

Main things people used it for:

• Text to video: describe a scene and get a clip.
• Image to video: animate a still picture.
• Cameos: insert yourself, or someone who granted permission, into a generated clip.
• Remixing: take another user’s clip and change it.

The app was video-first. Searches for a Sora image generator or Sora photos mostly refer to stills taken from videos, not to a separate image product. Style requests such as anime or movie-trailer parodies were common uses, but they were prompts to the same video model, not separate modes.

Where Sora was available and why it needed an invite

At launch the app was invite-only. Press coverage from the time describes a limited rollout that started in the United States and Canada, a common way to control demand and, in this case, computing capacity. Invite codes were handed out by existing users, which is why they were hard to find and why codes were traded online.

Later coverage reports these changes:

• OpenAI dropped the invite requirement in the US, Canada, Japan and South Korea for a limited time.
• The app expanded to Thailand, Taiwan and Vietnam.
• An Android version arrived, according to Android Central.

Availability in the UK and the EU is less clear. The original Sora video tool did reach the UK and EU in February 2025, for paying ChatGPT subscribers, after a delay that reporting linked to regulatory compliance. Reports on the newer app’s rollout do not list the UK or EU among its launch markets, and no official page confirming otherwise could be read for this guide. That is the likely source of the many searches asking why Sora was not available in the UK. It no longer matters in practice, because the app is closed everywhere.

The Sora watermark and logo: What it showed and why it existed

Videos downloaded from the app carried a visible, moving Sora logo, according to third-party write-ups. The idea was to make it obvious that a clip was AI-generated, which matters for a tool that can produce realistic people and scenes. Third-party reports also describe invisible provenance metadata (the C2PA standard) attached to some downloads. Reporting on exactly which downloads carried it is inconsistent, so treat the details as unconfirmed.

Many sites advertise Sora watermark removers and “watermark adders”, and many people search for the logo as a PNG. A few points are worth knowing:

• Because the app is closed, no new official Sora videos are being created. A clip with the mark is an old export.
• Cropping or removing the mark from a clip does not make it a real video. Posting it without disclosure can mislead viewers, and some platforms require AI labels.
• The Sora logo is OpenAI’s trademark. Using it to make an edited or fake clip look official is a different matter from using it to illustrate an article.

Why Sora shut down and what happened to the deals around it

OpenAI announced the shutdown on March 24, 2026 in a post on X: “We’re saying goodbye to Sora.” NBC News reported that the app was resource-intensive and that shutting it freed computing capacity for coding, reasoning and text work. According to The Wall Street Journal, as cited by NBC, executives said the company had to narrow its focus. Late in 2025 OpenAI had already limited how many videos users could generate because of chip shortages.

Some secondary outlets add that the Sora research team moved toward world simulation research for robotics. Treat that as reporting, not as an official statement we could verify.

The Disney agreement was affected too. Disney had announced a three-year deal with OpenAI in December 2025, with a planned $1 billion investment. NBC reported, citing a source, that the deal is not proceeding, and Disney said it respects OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business. The app had also drawn criticism over clips featuring well-known characters and over deepfake concerns, which is where the “why Sora is bad” searches come from. Those were concerns raised by critics and rights holders, not findings of wrongdoing.

Status, cost and what you can still do

Prices checked on October 29, 2026. There is no current Sora price to quote, because OpenAI no longer offers the product. Searches about the cost or whether Sora will be free now have a short answer: nothing is on sale.

Points from OpenAI’s help article on the discontinuation, as summarized in search results:

• Users could export their content from a Sora sunset page, and OpenAI said it would email when an export was ready.
• After the shutdown and any final export window, OpenAI said it would permanently delete data associated with Sora use. The closing date of the export window was not stated in what could be read.
• Purchased credits can still be used for Codex, according to one version of the article.

If a site claims to offer “Sora unblocked”, a Sora login or a free invite code, be careful. There is no live service for these to unlock, and such pages are a common route to scams and credential theft. Our guide on prompt injection is a reminder that AI branded sites are not always what they claim.

What replaced Sora: Video generators you can use instead

OpenAI has not named a direct replacement, and it has said it is exiting video generation, per Disney’s statement quoted by NBC. Will Sora come back? OpenAI has given no sign of it. People looking for the same kind of tool have these options, which are separate companies with their own terms and prices:

Prices and limits change often and are not listed here, because they should be taken from each maker’s own pricing page. For what you can do without paying, see our guide to free AI video generators and their limits.

Common questions