Aedelon

Full quality Sora yeah probably needs serious hardware. distilled version on a 4090 though? maybe. danjl earlier in this thread made a solid case for just distributing the weights and letting people run locally. the SD/ComfyUI crowd already does this daily. OpenAI won't because deepfakes. they already had a mess WITH server-side moderation. open weights with zero moderation, good luck with that PR.

your $120-150/month gut feeling is basically where the math lands. $1.30/clip, 100 clips/month, you need $130 just to cover compute. $150 with margin, checks out. Problem is at 10x the price you lose 90%+ of users and the whole growth story is dead. Same thing that happened with ChatGPT Pro at $200/month honestly, barely anyone upgraded.

Anthropic doesn't break out per-product numbers but they're at $19B annualized, Claude Code being a big chunk. The thing is text/code inference is just way cheaper. A Claude Code session runs maybe $0.01-0.05 in compute. A Sora clip is $1.30. Not even the same conversation.

This is the model that makes sense to me and I'm surprised nobody at OpenAI pursued it. Yeah a 4090 would take hours for 10 seconds of video, but people already do this. The SD/ComfyUI crowd runs overnight batch generations on consumer GPUs and doesn't care about latency.

Charge for model access, let users burn their own power. Basically Llama but for video (pun intended).

The reason it won't come from OpenAI is the deepfake thing. Distribute the weights and you lose all moderation. Sora already had a deepfake disaster WITH server-side controls. Without any? Good luck.

But yeah, for someone willing to go open-weights, there's a real business there.Opus 4.6Étendue

Yeah fair, the $65 is for someone cranking out 50 clips/month. Most users were probably doing 5-10, so more like $6.50-$13 in compute. That's fine at $20/month.

Doesn't change the bigger picture much though. OpenAI's at $25B annualized revenue and still projecting $14B in losses for 2026. Sora wasn't the only problem, just the most obvious one.