Runway Pricing (2026): Every Plan, and What a Second Actually Costs

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What Runway costs

Plan	Monthly	Billed yearly	Credits	Notable
Free	$0	$0	125, one time only	A selection of models, 5GB storage
Standard	$15	$12/mo, saves $36/yr	625/mo	All models, 4K upscaling, no watermarks
Pro	$35	$28/mo, saves $84/yr	2,250/mo	Custom voices, 500GB storage, Topaz upscale
Max	$95	$76/mo, saves $228/yr	9,500/mo	Credits roll over 1 month, ProRes, HDR
Enterprise	Quote	Quote	Custom	SSO, analytics, teamspaces

Verified on runway.com/pricing, 22 August 2026.

For every tool in this category side by side, with cost per second worked out from each vendor’s own conversions, see AI video generator pricing compared.

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The free plan is a demo, and Runway says so

Runway’s free plan gives you 125 credits, one time. They do not refill monthly. The page describes them as one time credits to explore Runway’s AI tools, which is honest, and it is worth repeating because a great many articles list Runway’s free tier as though it renews.

Using Runway’s own conversion, 625 credits is 52 seconds of Gen-4.5. So 125 credits is roughly 10 seconds of finished video, once. Spend it deliberately on the one shot that will tell you whether the output quality justifies a subscription.

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What a second costs

Runway is the only vendor in this category that publishes the credit to seconds conversion right on the pricing page. That makes it the easiest tool here to compare honestly, and the comparison is not flattering at entry level.

Plan	Price	Seconds of Gen-4.5	Cost per second
Standard	$15	52	$0.288
Pro	$35	187	$0.187
Max	$95	791	$0.120
Standard, billed yearly	$12	52	$0.231
Pro, billed yearly	$28	187	$0.150
Max, billed yearly	$76	791	$0.096

Two things fall out of that. Buying up is worth far more here than on most platforms: Max is 2.4 times cheaper per second than Standard, which is the steepest volume discount we found across nine tools. And Runway Standard is the most expensive entry plan per second in the whole category, roughly five times the cost of Pika Standard at 720p.

That is a statement about price, not quality. Gen-4.5 is Runway’s premium model and the output is not directly comparable to a 720p clip from a cheaper tool. But if your constraint is budget rather than fidelity, the arithmetic matters.

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What each plan adds

Standard, $15 unlocks every image and video model Runway offers, including Gen-4.5, Nano Banana Pro, Aleph and Veo 3.1, plus 4K upscaling and watermark removal. On Runway’s conversion, 625 credits is 52 seconds of Gen-4.5, 104 seconds of Gen-4 Turbo, or 78 Gen-4 images at 1080p.

Pro, $35 adds custom voice creation for lip sync and text to speech, 500GB of asset storage, Topaz AI upscaling and unlimited access to a set of models including Gen-4.5, Seedance 2.5, Kling 3.0 and Nano Banana Pro. 2,250 credits is 187 seconds of Gen-4.5.

Max, $95 is the only plan where unused credits roll over, for one month. It adds studio formats including ProRes and image sequences, HDR generation up to 16 bit, and first access to new models. 9,500 credits is 791 seconds of Gen-4.5, or 1,900 seconds of Gen-4 Turbo.

Enterprise is quote only and adds single sign on, workspace analytics, configurable teamspaces and custom credit packages.

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Where Runway sits against the rest

Tool	Entry paid plan	Free plan
Kling AI	$8.80/mo ongoing	None
Pika	$10/mo	80 credits monthly
Vidu	$10/mo	10 references monthly
Runway	$12/mo billed yearly, $15 monthly	125 credits, one time
HeyGen	$29/mo	3 videos monthly
Luma AI	$30/mo	None since early 2026

Runway sits in the middle on headline price and at the top on cost per second at entry. Its case rests on model breadth, since one subscription gives you access to Gen-4.5 alongside third party models including Kling and Veo, which is a genuinely different proposition from buying each separately.

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A worked example: one month of real work

Say you need eight finished 5 second clips a month for social posts, delivered at Gen-4.5 quality.

Eight clips at 5 seconds is 40 seconds. Runway Standard gives 52 seconds of Gen-4.5 for $15, so you fit, with 12 seconds of headroom for one retry. That is the entire month gone on eight clips and one mistake.

Now assume the realistic version, where roughly half of what you generate is unusable and gets regenerated. Sixteen generations at 5 seconds is 80 seconds, which is above Standard and inside Pro at 187 seconds. So the plan you actually need is Pro at $35, not Standard at $15, and the difference is not the number of clips you want but the number of attempts you need.

That ratio is the thing to plan around. If you expect a 50% keep rate, double your finished output before choosing a tier. If you are new to prompting video models, assume worse than 50%.

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When annual billing is worth it

Runway states the annual saving in dollars rather than percentages, which is unusually straightforward: $36 a year on Standard, $84 on Pro, $228 on Max.

Plan	Monthly	Yearly equivalent	Annual saving	Break even
Standard	$15	$12/mo	$36	10 months
Pro	$35	$28/mo	$84	10 months
Max	$95	$76/mo	$228	10 months

Every tier works out at a 20% discount and a ten month break even. So annual billing pays for itself only if you are confident of using Runway for at least ten of the next twelve months. In a category where the tool you prefer can change within a quarter, that is a real commitment rather than an obvious saving.

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The thing that actually justifies the price

Runway is the most expensive tool in this comparison per second at entry level. Its case does not rest on price, it rests on breadth.

A Standard subscription at $15 gives access to Gen-4.5, Gen-4 Turbo, Nano Banana Pro, Aleph, Veo 3.1 and more, and Pro and Max add Seedance 2.5 and Kling 3.0. If you were otherwise going to subscribe to Kling separately at $8.80 and something else alongside it, the comparison is not Runway against one competitor, it is Runway against the sum of what you would otherwise buy.

That is a genuinely different value proposition from the rest of this group, and it is the reason to choose Runway despite the per second figure rather than in spite of it.

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What is not included

Credits do not roll over on Free, Standard or Pro. Only Max rolls unused credits, and only for one month. On every other tier, credits you do not spend by the end of the billing period are gone.

Storage is tiered and worth checking against your workflow: 5GB on Free, 500GB on Pro. The Standard allowance is not stated on the pricing page.

Runway was also running a promotion when we captured this, offering unlimited Hailuo 3.0 on new Max plans until 23 August 2026. We have excluded it from every table above, because a promotion that ends tomorrow is not a price, and it is exactly the kind of figure that ends up quoted as standard six months later.

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How we verified this

We went to runway.com, followed the navigation to the pricing page rather than guessing a URL, and expanded the monthly and yearly toggles so both billing states were captured rather than whichever one happened to be showing. All figures were read from Runway’s own page on 22 August 2026.

Runway was running a promotion at the time of capture, offering unlimited Hailuo 3.0 on new Max plans until 23 August 2026. Promotional terms are not included in the tables above, because a price that expires tomorrow is not a price.

We have not tested Runway’s output quality and make no claim about it here. This page reports what Runway publishes and what that arithmetic implies. Prices in this category move quickly, so check the page yourself before paying.

Runway is the priciest per second at entry. For the cheapest, see Pika pricing and Kling AI pricing.