Choosing Between Sora, Gemini, and DeepSeek for a Side Project? Read the Fine Print First.

Was about to pick one of these three for a small side project and nearly made a costly mistake, so sharing before anyone else makes the same one.

The mistake I almost made

I was leaning toward building a small AI video feature on Sora's API — good output quality, straightforward per-second pricing. Then I actually read OpenAI's own help docs instead of just the launch blog posts, and found this: the Sora consumer app was already discontinued back in April 2026, and the API itself is scheduled to sunset on September 24, 2026. As a solo builder with zero appetite for migrating a core feature two months after shipping it, that single fact killed the plan entirely.

Lesson: for anything you're betting a real feature on, check the platform's actual support/help docs for sunset or deprecation notices before you check the pricing page. The marketing page won't tell you this. The help center will.

What these three actually are, for anyone comparing them like I was

Not really competitors — different jobs entirely:

Sora — video generation specifically. Currently the one with the biggest "should I actually build on this" question mark, for the reason above.

Gemini — Google's general-purpose assistant, deeply wired into Workspace, Search, and Android, with genuinely capable native multimodal handling (images, audio, video) and a large context window on paid tiers.

DeepSeek — open-weight, self-hostable, dramatically cheaper to run thanks to its architecture, and consistently strong specifically at coding and reasoning tasks. Not a video tool, not deeply ecosystem-integrated — a focused specialist.

What I ended up doing

Skipped Sora entirely given the sunset timeline. For the side project's actual need (some document-heavy processing plus occasional coding assistance for build scripts), went with a mix — DeepSeek for the cost-sensitive coding tasks, Gemini for anything touching Google Docs data directly since the integration was already free. No video feature for now; revisiting once a stable, actively-maintained option settles into that gap.

The actual takeaway for other solo builders

Before committing a core feature to any AI API, specifically check for a deprecation or sunset notice in the provider's help center, not just their pricing or launch page. It takes five minutes and could save you a very expensive rebuild later. Sora's situation right now is a good real-world example of exactly why that check matters.

Further reading

Longer version of this on my blog: Sora vs Gemini vs DeepSeek — What They Actually Do, original on my site: Sora vs Gemini vs DeepSeek. Also covered GPT-6 Astra if you're weighing OpenAI's other recent releases for your own stack.

Anyone else nearly build on something that turned out to be getting sunset? Curious how you caught it, if you did.