Runway Pricing (2026): Standard $15, Pro $35, Max $95, and What a Second of AI Video Costs

The short answer

As of October 18, 2026, Runway costs $0 on Free (125 one-time credits), $15 a month on Standard ($12 billed yearly) for 625 credits, $35 on Pro ($28 yearly) for 2,250, and $95 on Max ($76 yearly) for 9,500. Gen-4.5, the model most people come for, burns 12 credits a second. So Standard is 52 seconds of video a month, Pro is about three minutes, and Max is about thirteen.

Seconds are the unit that matters, and most people underestimate how many they'll throw away. Below is what a second costs on each plan, and what a finished 30-second ad costs once you count the takes you don't keep.

Every Runway plan

What else moves between tiers: parallel generations (5, 15, 20), projects (3, 5, 10), storage (20GB, 100GB, 500GB), and brand kits and custom voice clones (none on Standard, one each on Pro, three each on Max). Pro is the first plan that lists credit top-ups and Runway's MCP connection. Max adds HDR and ProRes output, and this month it also lists unlimited Wan 3.0 generations, with "unlimited in Tool Mode until October 18", so that part ends today. Runway's Team and Enterprise prices sit behind a separate tab that didn't load for this check, and the page is currently advertising two free months of usage for enterprises that sign by October 31.

What one second costs on each plan

Divide the plan price by its Gen-4.5 seconds:

Unlike most credit plans, Runway does get cheaper per unit as you go up: Max is less than half Standard's price per second. That's the reason to size the plan on volume, not features.

The model matters as much as the plan. Runway's own table lists Gen-4.5 at 60 credits per 5 seconds, Aleph 2.0 at 140 per 5 seconds, Seedance 2.0 Pro (1080p) at 160 per 4 seconds and Seedance 2.0 Fast at 116 per 4 seconds. Seedance Pro is about 3.3 times Gen-4.5 per second. Gen-4 Turbo goes the other way: Runway's plan cards show twice as many seconds as Gen-4.5 on Standard and Pro.

A worked example: what a 30-second product ad really costs

Say a shop owner wants a 30-second ad built from six 5-second shots, made with Gen-4.5. One pass at all six shots is 6 × 60 = 360 credits. Nobody keeps every first take, though. Assume you generate three versions of each shot and keep the best one. That's an assumption, not a Runway number, so swap in your own keep rate.

• Per finished ad: 18 generations × 60 credits = 1,080 credits.
• Standard (625): not even one finished ad a month.
• Pro (2,250): 2 finished ads, 90 credits left over. About $17.50 an ad at $35, or $14 billed yearly.
• Max (9,500): 8 finished ads, 860 left, which roll forward one month. About $11.90 an ad at $95, or $9.50 yearly.

So the honest monthly price of "a few AI ads" is the plan whose credits cover your retakes, and that's usually one tier higher than the plan whose seconds cover the final cut. If you make ads every month, Max's rollover matters too: on Standard and Pro, a slow month's credits vanish within 24 hours of your billing date.

Is Runway free?

Sort of. Free gives 125 credits once, not every month. At 12 a second that's about 10 seconds of Gen-4.5, or roughly 15 Gen-4 images at 8 credits each. Enough to see whether the output is good enough for your brand, not enough to make anything you'd publish. Those credits don't expire, so there's no rush to use them.

Runway or HeyGen

They get lined up against each other, but they solve different problems. Runway makes footage nobody filmed: product shots, scenes, b-roll. HeyGen makes a person talking to camera and charges by the minute. One minute of Runway Gen-4.5 is 720 credits, about $11 on Pro. One minute of a HeyGen Avatar IV made from a photo is 16 credits, about $0.77 on HeyGen's $29 Creator plan. If the video is someone explaining something, HeyGen is a fraction of the cost. The per-minute rates for every HeyGen model are on HeyGen pricing.

Which plan to buy

• Free to test whether Runway's output fits your brand at all.
• Standard ($15, $12 yearly) for stills and the occasional short clip. 52 seconds a month isn't an ad budget.
• Pro ($35, $28 yearly) for one or two finished ads a month, a brand kit and top-ups when a launch week runs hot.
• Max ($95, $76 yearly) once you make video every week. It's the cheapest per second and the only plan whose credits roll over.

The video is the last step. The script, the hook and the offer it points to decide whether it sells, and most of that work happens in a chat assistant first: the prompts for that are in ChatGPT for marketing and Claude for marketing. Where AI video fits next to email, social and content for a small team is in AI for small business marketing.

Buying a video tool is the cheap part. Turning it into a repeatable process, who writes, who generates, who approves and where it ships, is the AI implementation work I do for small teams.

Sources

Read on October 18, 2026: Runway pricing page, runwayml.com/pricing (plan prices monthly and yearly, credits, the seconds-per-plan figures on each plan card, plan features, the per-model credit table, the FAQ on 12 credits a second for Gen-4.5, top-ups, rollover and plan changes, the enterprise banner). The Team and Enterprise tab did not render for this check. HeyGen Help Center, "How to Use Credits on HeyGen" (Avatar IV photo look at 16 credits a minute) and HeyGen's pricing page (Creator $29 for 600 credits). Prices in USD. Per-second and per-ad costs are my arithmetic from those published numbers; the three-takes-per-shot rate is an assumption, labeled as one.