Re:OpenAI set to discontinue Sora video platform
by friendzis on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @11:07AM
(#47518354)
The lock-in of email platforms is the address. With IMAP you can extract the messages right away and migrate. Yet, you would still have to check the old mailbox for stray emails that you must tell to reach you on the new address. And continue doing so for years or risk missing some critical email.
Coincidentally, bringing your own address that can be migrates away is somewhere between impossible and expensive.
Re:OpenAI set to discontinue Sora video platform
by juped on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @11:33AM
(#47518778)
No, you can do it on all the major providers for either no or low cost.
Re:OpenAI set to discontinue Sora video platform
by friendzis on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @11:54AM
(#47519074)
Disregarding the grandfathered free accounts, own domain is $7.20/user/month on gmail, €5/month on Proton. On microsoft that's business tier feature and AFAIK not supported at all on Yahoo.
Re:OpenAI set to discontinue Sora video platform
by vel0city on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @12:43PM
(#47519811)
Zoho Mail Lite is $1/user/mo when billed annually.
https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
A few DNS hosting companies still bundle in a few free email mailboxes with registration costs but that is becoming more rare.
Some of that is seeking to kill competitors before they can get established. That's normal and has been around for generations, if not since trading was invented.
But most of what we've seen during the "enshitification age" has been to burn money until you achieve a critical mass of users. However, this only really applies to social platforms where the point of it is communicating with people you know. That's the lock-in. You convinced Grandma to join Bookface and now you feel bad leaving if she doesn't leave at the same time, and more importantly, who wants to join Google Square if nobody else uses it?
That's not going to work for AI platforms.
What I do see potentially working is one method that email platforms use to lock in users: having tons of data you can't export/migrate. If you spent lots of time training your AI by feeding it your data, that's going to make it harder to leave.
So far none of them have capitalized on this (probably due to various technical reasons) but I expect it to start eventually.