Credits charged for pre-compute moderation blocks?

API
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Getting charged premium Sora credits for requests that are blocked by the content filter before any generation occurs.

No video generated , no compute used → why are the credits gone?

This seems like a billing bug. If the filter stops the request before the generation process starts, the credits shouldn’t be consumed. I’m paying for compute and output, not for access to their content moderation system.

I paid for $50 in credits and have already lost several credits with no actual video produced—just a bunch of content moderation notices that came back almost immediately after submission.

Has anyone else hit this? Any official word on whether this is intentional?

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Hi and welcome to the community!

That does sound overly restrictive. I’ll forward this to the staff to review. Could you share a request ID so they can take a closer look at your case?

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There are a 2 scenarios here:

  1. The prompt was submitted, the video was mostly or entirely generated. In the remaining 75-99% of the generation, the content filter catches something it (arbitrarily) finds obscene, and cancels the generation. You are charged the full amount for the generation.
  2. The prompt was submitted and immediately flagged by the content filter. Effectively very little or no video compute was likely consumed. You are STILL charged the full amount for the generation.

In scenario #1, they almost have some wiggle room.

Their stance is that when we are purchasing credits for advanced API access (Sora 2, Codex, etc.)—or credits for Sora directly in-app—we are doing so with the premise that credits = video compute, and nothing more.

I don’t like that approach. I don’t think that’s a good way to run the service. But they do at least have a point that full generations consume compute even if the content filter can’t allow it to be returned to the user.

However, scenario #2 is the main issue I’m describing. The content filter catches it—probably based on prompt text alone!—rejects it, and then still deducts your credits even though there’s no way that significant video compute was consumed for this.

And that, to me, feels a bit dicey. On its own, advertising the sale of “video credits” does generally imply that you’ll get videos in exchange for your credits. Already we’re being a bit misled by being slapped with the “well, actually, your credits are compute, not videos”.

But for them to then expand that concept to, “well, actually, your credits are just compute requests, not even demonstrably consumed compute in our infrastructure, and definitely not guaranteed videos”—that feels particularly egregious to me. It feels like money is just being siphoned out of my bank account with no value in return whatsoever.

Hopefully this post helps you all to be careful when leveraging video generation credits on API or in the app directly, since it seems that you can very easily wipe your entire balance with videos that get flagged before the generation even starts. If you’ve hooked up an application to it and your users are flooding it with content violations, I think it would get out of hand quickly.

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Thanks! Appreciate the support. Once I get a chance to revisit that project I’ll have to dig one up.

Hopefully their system is just mishandling this and they intend to fix it. If this is the official policy that will be quite troublesome.