OpenAI killed Sora
Chronology and source correction — October 11, 2026: This preserves my March 30 site-removal account. The corporate comparison below was my interpretation of announced changes, not a measured explanation of OpenAI’s economics. OpenAI’s Sora page records product unavailability from April 26, 2026; the March opening should not imply that all Sora access had already ended that afternoon. The useful evidence in this essay is the specific unused features I chose to remove.
Not sunsetted. Killed.
The product they hyped as the next ChatGPT.
The one Disney was about to invest a billion dollars around.
The one that was supposed to turn OpenAI into the creative engine of the AI era.
The announcement was sudden; the end of access followed its announced schedule.
I read the announcement as a reminder that even large teams have to choose where to spend compute and attention. I did not have OpenAI’s internal allocation or profitability records.
Sora required compute, but I did not have a measured comparison of those costs or evidence of the company’s alternative allocation.
The original user-count, profitability and two-year survival claims were not substantiated here. My own decision did not need them: I was maintaining site features that I reported people were not using.
From outside I could not judge how difficult that trade-off was.
The lesson I took for my own site was to stop postponing a decision I could make.
5,049 lines deleted
Today I pushed a pull request on Founder Reality. 84 files changed. 5,049 lines deleted. 177 added.
I killed the forum.
Killed Founder Simulation.
Killed the Honest Money section.
Killed the investing page.
Nobody was using any of it.
I built it because I could, not because anyone needed it.
The forum had been dead for months. I kept it running because I'd built it.
Because removing it felt like going backwards. Because maybe someone would start posting tomorrow.
Nobody was coming tomorrow.
The trap
Adding feels like progress. That's the trap.
A new feature. A new section. A new product. Every addition comes with a little hit of optimism. Every removal triggers the feeling that you're shrinking.
I took the announcement as a reminder to review my own distractions. I did not need to know OpenAI’s internal economics to see the unused features on my site.
Every feature I maintained was time I wasn't spending on content.
Every dead product on my site was cognitive overhead for someone visiting for the first time and trying to figure out what this place actually is.
So I ripped it out. All of it.
Replaced every "Post to the forum" prompt across 16 weeks of content with one word: Reflect.
Because that's what actually mattered. Not performing your learning in a dead forum thread. Thinking for yourself.
Clarity, not failure
The Sora story isn't a failure story. It's a clarity story.
For my site, the useful part was choosing what to stop maintaining. I could describe that decision directly instead of claiming to know when OpenAI should have acted.
5,049 lines deleted. The site is faster. The experience is cleaner. And I stopped pretending things were going to magically start working.
Addition is easy. Subtraction is strategy.