Asked Sora to generate a 60-second video for our pitch deck. Used the wrong model tier.

We needed a short explainer video for a seed round pitch. I thought, hey, let's use AI video generation, it'll be impressive.

I went to the platform, set up my prompts carefully, described the scenes, specified the style. Clicked generate. Went to make coffee.

Came back to a $340 charge.

Turns out I had accidentally selected the "Ultra HD, 60fps, 60-second" tier instead of the standard one. The price difference is not small. The price difference is $340 vs $4.

The video was genuinely impressive. The investors asked if it was "real footage" which I took as a compliment.

We did not get funded. But we had a very expensive video.