Sora is gone; one-off AI video favors pay-per-second

As of late 2026, several secondary sources (no OpenAI announcement was found) report the Sora app closed on Apr 26, 2026 and the Sora API and Sora 2 endpoints shut down on Sep 24, 2026, with no replacement. Don't plan around Sora. For a single video, pay-per-second API access through fal.ai was estimated well below a subscription: roughly $0.11/s for Kling 3.0 and $0.20/s for Veo 3.1 without audio, with native audio about doubling that. Higgsfield is subscription-based, about $59/month for a tier including Veo; its credits expire and reviews complain about auto-renewal and billing, and its free tier yielded effectively no video. Prices are third-party and change often, so check live pricing. Models still garble text, so render text, logos and captions in code and composite them.