Runway review: pricing, credits, API and the end of Unlimited

This review is built from what could be checked on November 3, 2026: Runway's pricing page, help center, terms, privacy and usage policies, API documentation, changelog and company news; Artificial Analysis's video leaderboards; a public test of Aleph 2.0 by the Creative AI Show on YouTube; reporting by PYMNTS, Dealroom, 404 Media and Engadget; Sacra's estimates; the App Store, including Apple's feed of recent reviews, and Google Play; and rivals' own pricing pages. Runway's claims about itself are labelled as its own.

What Runway is

Runway is a web studio for generating and editing video, images and audio, a developer API, and a research lab that now calls itself a world model company. All three belong to Runway AI, Inc. of New York, founded in 2018 according to Dealroom and Crypto Briefing. Runway says more than 60 million creators use it.

For most buyers the product is the web app at app.runwayml.com, with iOS and Android apps and panels for Premiere Pro, After Effects and DaVinci Resolve. Runway's own models sit beside other labs' models on one credit balance:

Sources: pricing page, changelog and the Kling 4.0 page. An Agent can plan a video in a chat, pick a model for each shot and assemble the result with voiceover and music.

What changed in 2026

For buyers the biggest change is the end of Unlimited. Runway stopped selling its Unlimited plan on June 1, 2026, replaced it with Max, and is ending the remaining Unlimited subscriptions on November 30, 2026 (help center).

The product also turned from a model maker into a platform for many labs' models:

• May: Runway Agent (May 13) and Aleph 2.0 with Edit Studio (May 21); Agent 2.0 for marketers followed on June 25.
• August: Seedance 2.5 at 1080p (August 15), Ruby for SDR-to-HDR conversion (August 20) and Wan 3.0 (August 24).
• September: the Team plan (September 4), Adobe plugins (September 8), a DaVinci Resolve plugin (September 23), and unified enterprise credits across the web app and API (September 18).
• October: Runway on Claude Marketplace for enterprises (October 20), App Studio (October 26) and Runway Ads on every paid plan (October 27); Kling 4.0 at 25% off through November 30.

The company itself is moving toward robotics. It raised US$315 million in a Series E led by General Atlantic on February 10, 2026; Sacra and Implicator.ai, citing Bloomberg, put the valuation at US$5.3 billion. It opened offices in Tokyo (May 14, an initial US$40 million), London as its European headquarters (June 1, US$100 million over 18 months) and Paris (July 6, US$30 million). On September 8 the team of Kinetix, a Paris lab working on 3D human motion, joined Runway's robotics research; Dealroom calls it Runway's first European acquisition, of a 10-person company. The same day co-CEO Anastasis Germanidis said annual recurring revenue had doubled since April to US$200 million (PYMNTS); Sacra estimates US$200 million in August, up from US$96 million at the end of 2025. On September 30 Runway announced Praxis-1, an open-weight robot control model.

For a video buyer the catch is that Gen-4.5, Runway's flagship generator, dates from December 1, 2025, and Runway's research page lists no successor. Most new video capability on Runway in 2026 came from models other labs make.

Plans and what credits buy

Source: Runway's pricing page and the Free plan help page. A Standard credit costs 2.4 US cents and a Max credit 1 cent, so a 5-second Gen-4.5 clip (60 credits) costs about US$1.44 on monthly Standard and US$0.60 on Max. Extra credits cost 1 cent each with a minimum of 1,000, never expire, and are sold only on paid plans.

Other models cost more per clip. On the pricing page an Aleph 2.0 edit is 140 credits per 5 seconds, Kling 4.0 at 1080p 118 credits per 5 seconds (89 until November 30), and Seedance 2.0 Pro at 1080p 160 credits per 4 seconds. Standard's 625 credits therefore buy ten 5-second Gen-4.5 clips, four Aleph 2.0 edits or five Kling 4.0 clips at list price.

Two billing rules catch people out. Models with an Auto duration, such as Seedance 2.5, first take the most the clip could cost and refund the rest when it finishes; at 1080p Seedance 2.5 costs 68 credits a second (help center). And credits are spent whenever a generation finishes, whatever it looks like: Runway returns them only when a generation ends in an error, and refunds a plan only within 30 days if it is unused or close to unused (refund policy).

What happens to Unlimited

Unlimited cost US$95 a month and paired 2,250 credits with Explore Mode, which generated without limit at a relaxed rate: jobs could wait at busy times, only a few ran at once, and Veo 3 and 3.1 always needed credits (legacy plan page). Runway says those relaxed speeds caused queues and moved to a credit model.

Max replaces it at the same price with 9,500 credits a month, four times Unlimited's allowance, one month of rollover and no Explore Mode. On November 30, 2026 monthly Unlimited subscribers move to Max automatically unless they cancel; annual subscribers can cancel for a refund of their remaining months or accept a credit bonus. At 9,500 credits Max covers about 158 five-second Gen-4.5 clips a month.

A separate Unlimited Mode still exists, but narrowly: on Pro and Max, only for models that show the switch, with longer waits and fewer jobs at once, and Runway says the models vary with promotions and plan type (help center, November 1, 2026). PricingSaaS logged one such offer, unlimited Wan 3.0 on Max, which ended on October 18. Anyone who relied on unlimited relaxed generation has no equivalent on Runway's price list after November 30.

API prices

Runway Dev bills US$0.01 a credit, per second of output:

Source: Runway's API pricing. For Seedance 2.5 at 1080p Runway was the cheapest of the three hosts checked. The API adds a Model Router that picks a model by cost, speed or quality, published Workflows from the web app, and recipes such as a product ad from 200 credits for 4 seconds at 720p. Gen-4.5 through the API accepts prompts of up to 1,000 characters, 2 to 10 seconds and 720p only, and output links expire within 24 to 48 hours. For self-serve accounts, web-app credits and API credits are separate pools.

Where Gen-4.5 and Aleph 2.0 rank

Runway launched Gen-4.5 as first on Artificial Analysis's text-to-video board with 1,247 Elo as of November 30, 2025 (Runway). The board has since been re-anchored, with Kling 3.0 (Pro) fixed at 1000, and on November 3, 2026 Runway's models stood here:

Sources: text to video, image to video and video editing. Gen-4.5 is absent from the with-audio boards because it makes no sound, and Artificial Analysis notes it was judged on only the 61% of prompts that fit Runway's 1,000-character limit. Kling 4.0 was not on the boards yet, and OpenAI removed Sora 2 from its API on September 24, 2026 (OpenAI). Several models Runway hosts, among them Wan 3.0, MiniMax H3 and Seedance 2.5, sit near the top of these boards.

What public tests show

Outside evidence on Runway's own models is thin:

• Creative AI Show, May 22, 2026. The YouTube hosts used Aleph 2.0 on existing clips the day after launch (video). They found the workflow clunkier than expected, because Aleph 2.0 relies on editing a start frame and generating a new video from it.
• No Film School presented Gen-4.5 at launch as a model "that you didn't ask for" and judged the progress over Gen-4 modest to the naked eye (No Film School).

No published same-prompt test of Gen-4.5 against Kling 4.0 or Seedance 2.5 was found. The blind arena votes above are the largest public evidence, and they favour the models Runway hosts over its own.

What users report

The phone apps rate well overall: 4.5 from 19,253 ratings on the US App Store and 4.4 from 11.3K reviews on Google Play. Recent reviews are far harsher. In Apple's feed of the 50 most recent US reviews, written between October 22 and November 1, 2026, 37 gave one star and 8 gave five. The complaints repeat: credits used up on clips that ignored the request or added things nobody asked for, more credits needed to fix the model's own mistakes, a subscription that then asks for credit top-ups, and videos flagged by moderation. The five-star reviews praise the quality and the time saved, and two of them also call it pricey.

Runway's status page shows the cost of hosting other labs' models: in the last three months it logged failing or delayed Kling generations on November 2, elevated Seedance moderation errors on October 6 and Seedance safety false positives on August 19. Moderation itself cannot be switched off or relaxed by support for any account or topic.

Privacy, training and content rules

• Training: section 4.4 of the terms updated October 23, 2026 says inputs and outputs may be used to train Runway's models and grants Runway a perpetual, irrevocable license to do so. Runway's terms and help center, checked November 3, 2026, describe no way for self-serve plans (Free, Standard, Pro, Max and Team) to opt out of training.
• Enterprise: the plan that does get a commitment. Runway's August 20, 2026 enterprise post promises Enterprise customers no training on their data, and Runway lists uncapped IP indemnification, zero-data-retention support and contracts that bar third-party model providers from training on their content; its providers for Kling and Seedance say they do not process that data in China (enterprise FAQ).
• Security: SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001, with model training systems kept separate from customer content storage, per its data security page.
• Ownership: Runway claims no ownership of your outputs and allows commercial use without credit; Free plan videos carry a watermark.
• Content: the usage policy of March 6, 2026 bans adult nudity and sexual content, using someone's image, video or voice without permission, imitating a known living artist's style and impersonation; automated systems and human reviewers check inputs and outputs.
• Personal data: the privacy policy effective October 23, 2026 lists vendors such as Amazon Web Services and says sharing with advertising partners may count as a sale under some US state laws, which you can opt out of.
• Disputes: binding arbitration under New York law, unless you opt out.

Runway's own training data has been questioned. In July 2024 404 Media reported, from a leaked spreadsheet, that Runway gathered videos from thousands of YouTube channels and pirated films to train Gen-3; Engadget repeated the report and said Runway did not respond. Runway is also a defendant in Andersen v. Stability AI, an artists' copyright case in which a court let the core claims proceed in August 2024; the summary judgment hearing has moved to February 17, 2027 (ChatGPT Is Eating the World).

Who should not use Runway

• People who want unlimited generation: the last Unlimited plans end on November 30, 2026, and Max is a fixed credit allowance.
• Anyone who expects money back for clips that came out wrong: finished generations are charged, and refunds are only for unused plans.
• Teams whose footage must never train a model but cannot buy Enterprise: the standard terms allow it.
• Buyers who want the best text-to-video model for the price from Runway itself: Gen-4.5 is 720p, silent and 28th on the silent board.
• People who mostly use one hosted model, such as Kling 4.0: the maker's own app or a cheaper host may cost less per clip.

Alternatives

Runway is the stronger choice when you edit existing footage, need ProRes or HDR files, or want one bill for several labs' models with an API on top. It is the weaker one when you only need cheap clips from a single model, or when price per finished second matters more than tools. Credits are not comparable across sites, so run one prompt on two of them and compare the cost of the clip you keep.