Question 1

Sora cut its free generation limits? Is this new?

Accepted Answer

Sora has been relatively stable over the last 90 days. Sora has stayed stable, with minimal changes to its limits over time. Low recent constraint volatility — few meaningful restrictions in the last 12 months.

Question 2

Why is this happening — is it the tool or me?

Accepted Answer

Sora's free allowance itself shrank, and cost — not anything you did — drove it. OpenAI cut the free tier from roughly thirty video generations a day to about six, a drop of around eighty percent, with the Sora lead bluntly calling the economics unsustainable and saying the GPUs were melting. It paired that cut with paid credit packs at about four dollars for ten extra generations, so heavy days now carry a per-clip cost once the free quota is spent. Suddenly making far fewer clips than you remember is that reduction, not an outage — and the limit resets on a daily schedule, so if generation returns the next day at the same low ceiling you're hitting the new cap; a true outage would fail regardless of how many you'd already made. Space your generations across the daily reset, buy a credit pack when you need a concentrated burst, and save iterations for prompts you've already refined so scarce generations don't go on rough drafts. Paid tiers rewrite the math: Plus at twenty dollars a month carries roughly a thousand monthly credits, Pro at two hundred roughly ten thousand, and the Sora 2 API bills per second (around ten cents at 720p standard) when you need volume without daily caps. Two guardrails are worth separating from limits: Sora 2 blocks realistic third-party likeness by default unless the person opts in through Cameo, so an error there is policy, not a cap; and although the EU and UK were excluded at the December 2024 launch, that restriction lifted in February 2025, making a hard regional block today unusual enough to re-check.