Sora shutdown lesson: run a one-hour video vendor exit drill
OpenAI discontinued the Sora API on 2026-09-24. Rehearse losing a video vendor: swap the model id, rerun five prompts, and record what broke.
Run a vendor exit drill once a quarter: pick five real prompts, swap the model id in your config, rerun them, and write down what broke. One hour is enough. The reason is concrete: The Decoder reports OpenAI's Sora app closing in April 2026 and the API being discontinued on 2026-09-24, with users told to download their content.
A drill turns that kind of notice into a checklist you have already tested. The vendor facts are from The Decoder (read 2026-10-02); Sume facts are from its video docs. This is a planning method, not a statement about any vendor's plans.
What do I swap in the drill?
On Sume the model is a field in the request body, and ids are bare catalog ids such as seedance-2, with no provider prefix. Change that one value in config, keep the prompts, and note every request that Sume rejects. Typical breaks are a duration outside the new model's range, an aspect ratio it lacks, and a reference type it does not accept.
What should the drill record?
Fill a small table, one row per prompt. The goal is a known fallback, not a quality ranking.
| Prompt | Old model id | New model id | What broke | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Product on desk, 9:16 | (your current id) | (fallback id) | (for example, duration out of range) | (for example, set duration to 5) |
| Two-shot dialogue clip | (your current id) | (fallback id) | (for example, no audio reference) | (for example, pick another id) |
What about files I already made?
Download finished clips while the vendor still serves them. The Decoder reports that users had to download content before the shutdown, and a download takes minutes where a rebuild takes days. On Sume, finished video is fetched from the job's content URL with your API key.
How do I keep the drill cheap?
Use short clips at the lowest resolution the candidate model offers, and pick the fallback from the catalog rather than a launch post. Read supported_durations and pricing_skus first. Rerun the drill after any vendor notice, and keep the results next to your config so the swap is a diff, not a project.
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