Sora 2

What Sora 2 costs

Sora 2 bills $0.10 per second of generated video on the standard tier and $0.05 per second in batch. There is a single resolution – 720p, as 1280×720 landscape or 720×1280 portrait – so unlike most video models there is no resolution ladder to reason about. You pick a tier, and that is the entire pricing decision.

That simplicity is worth more than it sounds. Veo 3.1 spreads seven price points across three tiers and three resolutions, a twelve-fold gap from cheapest to dearest, and most of the money teams waste on video generation is lost choosing the wrong point on that ladder. Sora 2 has two prices and they differ by exactly 2x.

Batch or standard is the only decision

Batch halves the rate in exchange for latency: you submit the job and collect it later instead of waiting on the response. Same model, same resolution, same output.

That makes the choice unusually clean. If a person is watching a spinner – an interactive tool, a prompt-and-preview loop, a live demo – you are paying double for response time, and that may well be the right call. If the work is queued, scheduled or overnight, batch is a straight 50% saving with no quality trade-off whatsoever.

More production video work falls into the second category than teams assume. A pipeline generating fifty social clips a night has nobody waiting on it; it needs the clips by morning. Running that through the standard tier doubles the bill for latency no one consumes. Before committing to a rate, the question worth asking is not how fast the tier is, but who is waiting.

What a real project actually costs

The per-second rate understates true cost by a large factor, and the clip table above is the optimistic version – it prices one successful generation.

Generative video does not hand you a usable shot on the first attempt. Prompt adherence, motion artefacts, unintended camera movement and plain aesthetic misses mean a single shot commonly takes three to ten generations before one is worth keeping. The honest unit of cost is not the clip but the accepted clip.

At $0.05 per second in batch, a ten-second shot costs 50 cents per attempt. At a realistic five attempts per keeper, an accepted ten-second shot costs $2.50. A ninety-second sequence assembled from nine such shots runs about $22 in generation alone. That is the figure that belongs in a budget, and it is roughly five times what the rate card suggests at a glance.

The same multiplier applies to every model on this site, so comparing base rates is still the right way to compare providers – the retry factor is broadly common across them. It simply means every absolute number is about five times larger than it first appears.

Orientation is free, resolution is not

Portrait and landscape cost the same per second at every Sora tier. Vertical output for short-form platforms carries no premium, which is not true of every workflow: teams that generate landscape and crop to vertical in post are paying for pixels they discard, and getting a worse composition for the trouble. Generate in the aspect ratio you intend to publish in.

How Sora 2 compares

At $0.05 in batch, Sora 2 ties the cheapest published per-second rate in this database, matching Veo 3.1 Lite at 720p and Wan 2.5. On the standard tier it lands at $0.10, level with Veo 3.1 Fast at 720p.

The comparison that decides real projects is Sora 2 against Veo 3.1 Standard at $0.40 per second: 4x on the standard tier, 8x against batch. Whether that gap is justified depends entirely on whether your delivery needs what the higher tier provides, and for a 720p clip watched on a phone it very often does not. The expensive mistake in video generation is rarely picking the wrong vendor – it is defaulting to some vendor top tier for output nobody will ever see at full resolution.

Where Sora 2 runs out

720p is the ceiling. For 1080p delivery you need Sora 2 Pro, and for 4K neither Sora tier reaches it at any price – Veo 3.1 is the only model in this database that does, at $0.60 per second.

There is a workflow that avoids paying for resolution while you are still iterating: generate and select on Sora 2 at $0.05 to $0.10, then re-render only the chosen shots at the higher tier. Since selection discards roughly four attempts in five, doing the discarding at the cheap rate rather than the expensive one is where the saving actually lives. Working end to end at Sora 2 Pro 1080p costs 14x more per attempt than working in Sora 2 batch.