Runway public-data review for creators and small businesses

What changed on September 1, 2026: Unlimited is over

For years the reason to pay Runway $95 a month was Explore Mode — unlimited generations at a relaxed queue speed, without touching your credit balance. That is finished. Runway introduced Max on June 1, 2026 as the high-volume plan for new subscribers, and its help centre article Unlimited plan is switching to Max states that existing Unlimited subscriptions switched automatically on September 1, 2026, monthly subscribers moving across at the same $95 rate. Eligible legacy Unlimited subscriptions are being extended through November 30, 2026.

Runway's framing is that Max gives you 9,500 monthly credits — four times the Unlimited allowance — generated on demand with no queueing, and that unlike Explore Mode there is no wait time or cap on concurrent generations. That is a real trade, not a pure downgrade. But it converts an uncapped resource into a finite one, and the conversion rate is unforgiving: at Gen-4.5's 12 credits per second, 9,500 credits is about 13 minutes of finished video a month. Anyone whose workflow assumed free iteration in Explore Mode should redo their budget before November.

Runway's current pricing page corroborates this from the other direction: it lists Free, Standard, Pro, Max and Enterprise, and mentions neither Unlimited nor Explore Mode anywhere. Every tier on sale today is metered in credits.

Sourcing note: Runway's help centre blocks automated retrieval, so the dates and quotes in this section come from the indexed text of Runway's own help article linked above rather than from a page we fetched directly. The pricing page, which we did fetch, independently confirms that Unlimited and Explore Mode are no longer offered. If you hold a legacy Unlimited subscription, confirm your own end date in your Runway billing dashboard.

The plans, and what a credit actually costs

Plan prices and credit allowances are quoted from Runway's official pricing page. The two right-hand columns are our arithmetic — plan price divided by monthly credits — because that is the number that decides whether a generation is cheap or expensive, and Runway does not publish it.

The spread is the story. A Gen-4.5 second costs the same 12 credits on every plan, but a Standard subscriber paying monthly pays three times what a Max subscriber paying annually pays for that identical second — $0.024 per credit against $0.008. Runway's cheapest plan has its most expensive credits.

Now compare that to buying credits outright. Runway's developer API pricing page states that credits can be purchased for $0.01 per credit in the developer portal. That flat rate undercuts every subscription tier except Max — a Pro annual subscriber is paying about 24% more per credit than the developer portal charges, and a Standard monthly subscriber is paying 140% more. The pricing page also notes you can buy top-up credits from the Plans & Billing dashboard with a 1,000-credit minimum, but it does not publish the price of those in-app top-ups, so confirm that figure at checkout rather than assuming it matches the developer rate.

Two other rules worth knowing, both quoted from the pricing page: on Max, up to one month of unused credits rolls over to the following month, and any additional credits you purchase never expire. Standard and Pro allowances simply reset. That puts Runway between Synthesia, whose credits never roll over at all, and HeyGen, which carries credits for one cycle.

Credit burn rates by model

These are Runway's published per-second rates from its developer API pricing page. Everything draws on the same pool.

One thing worth reading off that table if you generate with ByteDance's models: Seedance 2.5 is cheaper than Seedance 2.0 at both resolutions they share — 20 and 30 credits per second at 480p and 720p against a flat 36 — while also generating longer clips with native audio. The ordering only flips at 1080p, where 2.0 costs 40 against 2.5's 68. Note too that the Seedance 2.5 reference surcharge is billed per second of input video rather than of output, so a long reference clip can cost more than the video it produces. Full breakdown in the Seedance public-data review.

Images are priced per image rather than per second: Muse Image at 1 credit at any resolution, Gen-4 Image Turbo at 2 at any resolution, Gen-4 Image at 5 (720p) or 8 (1080p), and the Magnific Precision Upscaler at 25 per image, or 150 when output exceeds 4096px.

What that buys you per month

Our arithmetic — plan credits divided by the published rate above — in seconds of finished video per month, if you spend the whole allowance on one model.

Gen-4.5 generates clips of 2 to 10 seconds according to Runway's API changelog entry for its February 10, 2026 launch. A full ten-second Gen-4.5 clip therefore costs 120 credits, which converts to $2.88 on Standard monthly, $2.30 on Standard annual, $1.87 on Pro monthly, $1.49 on Pro annual, $1.20 on Max monthly and $0.96 on Max annual. The same clip, generated the same way, at a 3x spread depending only on which checkout page you used.

Aleph 2.0's headline feature costs more than a Standard month

Runway announced Aleph 2.0 and Edit Studio on May 21, 2026, and the marquee claim is that you can now edit clips up to 30 seconds long at 1080p. It reached the API on June 2, 2026. The announcement says Aleph 2.0 in Edit Studio is available on all paid Runway plans — which is true, and slightly misleading.

At 28 credits per second, one 30-second Aleph 2 edit costs 840 credits. Standard's entire monthly allowance is 625. A Standard subscriber therefore cannot produce a single maximum-length Aleph edit in a month, no matter how they budget. Pro gets two per month with change left over; Max gets eleven. "Available on all paid plans" and "affordable on all paid plans" are different claims, and only the first one is being made.

Should you route Veo through Runway or go direct to Google?

This is the live question for anyone consolidating models before the Sora API shutdown on September 24, 2026, and the answer depends entirely on your Runway tier. Google's own Gemini API list price for Veo 3.1 Standard is $0.40 per second with audio included, as covered on our Google Veo review. Runway charges 40 credits per second for the same model with audio.

So Runway is a genuine discount channel for Veo only at the top tier, and an expensive one everywhere else. Two refinements matter. First, Runway sells a no-audio Veo 3.1 at half price — 20 credits per second — and Google's own pricing page has no silent discount, so if you are scoring to music anyway that option exists only through Runway. Second, the pattern reverses on the cheap tiers: Runway's Veo 3.1 Fast with audio at 15 credits is $0.15 per second at the developer rate, against Google's $0.10 at 720p and $0.12 at 1080p, so Fast-tier work is cheaper bought direct.

One gap to plan around: Runway's pricing page names Kling 3.0 among the models available in the app, but Kling does not appear anywhere on Runway's developer API pricing page. If your reason for consolidating on Runway is programmatic access to Kling, verify that before you commit — our Kling AI review covers buying it direct.

The unusual part: the app and the API charge the same

Across the tools CartSignal has costed out, the app meter and the API meter almost never agree. Synthesia's API is 37.5% cheaper than its own editor. ElevenLabs runs ElevenAPI as a separate and cheaper-listing meter. HeyGen bills API work on an entirely separate pay-as-you-go plan.

Runway is the exception, and the two published sources line up exactly. The pricing page quotes Gen-4.5 at 60 credits per 5 seconds; the API docs say 12 per second. The pricing page quotes Aleph 2.0 at 140 per 5 seconds; the API says 28 per second. Seedance 2.0 at 1080p is 160 per 4 seconds on one page and 40 per second on the other. Four rates, four matches. There is no arbitrage between Runway's interface and Runway's API — the only variable you control is what you paid for the credit, which brings you back to the plan table above.

One meter that is not credits at all

The Magnific Video Upscaler is the exception to the credit model. Runway's API docs state it is billed per output frame, not per second of video, in dollars converted to credits by the formula ceil(USD / 0.01), with 720p given as $0.007 per frame. At 24 frames per second that is about $0.168 per second of footage before you account for higher resolutions — which can approach the cost of generating the clip in the first place. If upscaling is part of your pipeline, price it separately rather than assuming it rounds to nothing.

Best-fit use cases

• Teams that want several generative models — Runway's own plus third-party — behind one subscription and one credit balance
• Editing footage you already have, which is what Aleph 2.0 and Edit Studio are built for and what pure prompt-to-video models cannot do
• High-volume work at Max annual, the only configuration where Runway's credits beat buying them outright
• Iterating cheaply on Gen-4 Turbo at 5 credits per second before committing to a Gen-4.5 render
• Studio delivery needs — the pricing page lists ProRes output and 16-bit HDR generations as Max features

Limitations to verify

• Explore Mode is gone; if you are on legacy Unlimited, your extension runs to November 30, 2026 and then the credit ceiling applies
• Standard and Pro credits do not roll over — only Max carries one month
• Third-party model availability differs between the app and the API, Kling being the clearest example
• The in-app top-up credit price is not published on the pricing page; only the $0.01 developer-portal rate is
• Seedance 2.5 bills for input and reference video on top of output, so a reference-heavy generation costs more than the output rate implies
• Commercial-use rights, likeness policy and model-specific content rules still need checking against your actual output plan — the EU AI Act labeling guide covers what you must disclose regardless of what the vendor watermarks

How it fits against other tools here

Runway is a generator plus an editor, which is a different shape from most of this directory. If you want the cheapest published per-second price for prompt-to-clip work, Google Veo on the Gemini API starts at $0.05 per second and Kling competes on consumer credit plans — Runway's value is breadth, not unit price. If you need a person talking to camera, HeyGen and Synthesia are purpose-built and Runway is not; the HeyGen vs Synthesia comparison covers that split. If the job is cutting and captioning footage you shot conventionally, Descript is the cheaper category. And if you are turning scripts into faceless social video, Fliki is built for that pipeline. The full field is in the best AI video tools roundup.

Frequently asked questions

How much video does a Runway plan actually get you?

Divide the plan's credits by the model's credits-per-second rate. Gen-4.5 at 12 credits per second means Standard's 625 credits buy about 52 seconds a month, Pro's 2,250 about 187 seconds, and Max's 9,500 about 791 seconds — roughly 13 minutes. Gen-4 Turbo at 5 credits per second stretches those about 2.4x; Aleph 2 at 28 cuts them to about 22, 80 and 339 seconds.

Did Runway get rid of the Unlimited plan?

Yes. Max replaced Unlimited for new subscribers on June 1, 2026, and Runway's help centre states existing Unlimited subscriptions switched automatically to Max on September 1, 2026 at the same $95 monthly rate, with eligible legacy access extended through November 30, 2026. Explore Mode did not carry over, and the current pricing page does not mention Unlimited or Explore Mode at all.

Is Runway's API cheaper than its app?

No, and that makes Runway unusual in this directory. The credit rates on the pricing page match the developer API rates exactly across Gen-4.5, Aleph 2.0 and Seedance 2.0. What differs between buyers is not the rate but the price they paid for the credit.

Which Runway plan has the cheapest credits?

Max billed annually, at about $0.008 per credit. Standard billed monthly is the most expensive at about $0.024 — three times as much for the identical generation. Runway's developer portal sells credits at a flat $0.01, undercutting every tier except Max.

Do unused Runway credits roll over?

Only on Max, where the pricing page states up to one month of unused credits rolls over. Purchased credits never expire. Standard and Pro allowances reset each cycle.

Source links

• Official Runway pricing page
• Official developer API pricing
• Official API changelog
• Aleph 2.0 and Edit Studio announcement, May 21, 2026
• Runway help centre: Unlimited plan is switching to Max
• Official homepage