Runway

There are two things to count: how many seconds of video you need each month and how you will pay.

The app, free trial, and Gen-4.5 are available.

Who it is for. For those who work with existing footage: Aleph takes a finished clip and changes its lighting, weather, or an object with one sentence, while the editing suite and ProRes export on the Max plan bring the result to broadcast quality. And for those who want to keep their Gen-4.5 and third-party Kling 3.0, Seedance 2.5 and Veo 3.1in one window without taking out four subscriptions.

Who else. For marketers who need a batch of campaign assets: the agent takes the task in chat, chooses the models itself, and delivers images and clips in the required aspect ratios. Teams of two or more have been offered a separate plan since Sep 4, 2026, with a shared credit pool and shot-level edits.

Who it is not for. Anyone expecting volume from the entry plan: the 625 credits of Standard run out at the 52nd second of Gen-4.5, and the vendor pulled the old unlimited option from its lineup in June 2026.

Good fit: section 3 takes you from signing in to your first video. If you are choosing between it and Kling, see the choice in section 7.

What vibecoding isStarting from scratch: how to set tasks for agents with no coding experience

Three levels: make video from scratch with its own or a third-party model, remake finished footage, and assemble a campaign from pieces with the agent, chain builder, and editing suite.

Proprietary models. Gen-4.5 launched in December 2025 and remains the vendor's latest foundation model; its update history contains no mention of “Gen-5” as of 07.09.2026. It makes 2- to 10-second 720p clips from text or an image, does not generate audio, and produces 4K by upscaling the finished file. Alongside it, Gen-4 Turbo is 2.4 times cheaper, Act-Two transfers an actor's facial, head, and hand movement to a character, and Ruby has rendered video in HDR since 20.08.2026.

Third-party models inside. Since Feb 20, 2026, the vendor has integrated Kuaishou's Kling 3.0 and OpenAI's Sora 2 Pro; over six months, a dozen third-party models joined them, including ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 with clips up to 30 seconds with audio. The full list with dates and owners is collected in the questions. Each has its own credit rate, and Runway's own video editor shows Google's Nano Banana Pro in its model selector. The service has thus become a storefront where its own model sits alongside competitors.

Finished video editing. Since May 21, 2026, Aleph 2.0 takes clips up to 30 seconds in 1080p: you edit one frame or write “add a giant hand that picks up a truck like a toy,” and the model applies the edit to the whole clip. It lives in Edit Studio with a source-frame timeline, costs 28 credits per second, and is 2.3 times more expensive than generating from scratch. This is the axis on which Runway differs from pure generators.

Agent and assembly. Since May 13, 2026, Runway Agent takes a task in chat: you upload a product photo and ask for four drink flavors, and it analyzes the image, generates variations, and explains what it did. Workflows connects nodes into a chain from image through video to an Aleph edit, Studio has cut, joined, and exported the final clip since Jun 18, 2026, and Gen-4.5 and Aleph have delivered ProRes 4444 and PNG sequences for editing since 10.08.2026.

External access. The same models are available to developers through Runway Dev: an API priced at one cent per credit, which added MCP on Sep 2, 2026; Pro and Max also include MCP in the subscription. Web and API wallets are separate: subscription credits are not visible in the API, and vice versa.

What the vendor itself shows. The header video and screenshots above come from official Runway Academy videos from May and July 2026; the credit numbers in their headers belong to the vendor's demo account and are not plans. We did not run Runway ourselves for this task: the figures come from the listing, documentation, API pricing, and vendor videos.

You can start on the site or in the app without installing anything on your computer.

Step 1. Open runway.com and sign in with Google, Apple, or an email and password; the old runwayml.com address has redirected here since summer 2026. A free account receives 125 credits once.

Step 2. In a new session, choose an image, video, or Act-Two, describe the scene in English, and choose a model.

Step 3. Gen-4.5, watermark-free video, and 1080p exports require the Standard plan or above.  

Mobile. The "Runway: AI Image & Video" app is in the App Store and Google Play, the vendor itself is the publisher in both, version dated 30.08.2026. Inside is the same chat with the agent, images and video, and the subscription can be bought through the store. The Schoolboy Runaway game that ranks above it in the stores for the word "runway" has nothing to do with the AI.

Steps verified on Sep 6–7, 2026 against the live runway.com storefront, the vendor's help center and the App Store and Google Play listings

Runway took first place in the video-model ranking in December 2025, then fell to sixteenth by September 2026, so there will be no “best model” claim here.

Arena. When Gen-4.5 launched, the vendor claimed first place in the Artificial Analysis ranking with 1,247 Elo points, ahead of Veo 3, Kling 2.5, and Sora 2 Pro, and that snapshot from 11.30.2025 still appears on the announcement page. As of Jul 9, 2026, in the same ranking of models without sound, Gen-4.5 ranks sixteenth with 1,212 points in text generation and twenty-fourth with 1,257 in image generation, while Wan 3.0, Gemini Omni Flash, and MiniMax H3 lead the table. The vendor integrated Wan 3.0, the model that surpassed Gen-4.5 in the arena, on 08.24.2026. The arena measures base models, not the editor and agent built around them.

Scale. The vendor's only audience figure is “over 60 million creators” on its homepage and pricing page, with no period or counting method. Verifiable figures nearby: app-store ratings, seven offices according to the vendor's site, and a $5.3 billion valuation from the February 2026 round according to Crunchbase and TechCrunch; the company does not disclose headcount.

Demand. The position among video tools is shown under the card title, the whole tool ranking is on the shared page.

Entry costs $15 per month for 625 credits, and the core math is simple: one second of Gen-4.5 uses 12 credits, so Standard gives 52 seconds of video per month.

Credits. A credit costs one cent under the API pricing, and each model has its own rate: Gen-4.5 uses 12 credits per second, Gen-4 Turbo and Act-Two use 5 each, Aleph 2.0 uses 28, Veo 3.1 uses 40, Seedance 2.0 in 1080p uses 40, and a Gen-4 image in 1080p uses 8 credits. On Standard and Pro, unused credits expire on the billing date; on Max, they roll over for one month. Top-ups start at 1,000 credits for $10; Free cannot purchase top-ups.

Plans. According to the storefront on Jul 9, 2026: Standard is $15 for 625 credits, Pro $35 for 2,250, Max $95 for 9,500, and Team $69 per seat with a shared wallet. The storefront opens to annual billing by default and lists $12, $28, and $76 per month, which means one-time payments of $144, $336, and $912. The dollar prices themselves have not changed since December 2024; what they include has changed.

Where unlimited went. The $95 Unlimited plan with credit-free generations had existed since 2024 and disappeared from the storefront between May 7 and June 7, 2026, replaced by Max with 9,500 credits at the same price. The vendor's surfaces conflict over the credit-free mode: help dated 08.25.2026 promises Unlimited Mode on Pro and Max for its own models in a slow queue, while storefront data on Jul 9, 2026 shows the mode disabled on every plan and leaves only video upscaling to 4K unlimited. Third-party models inside always use credits, while legacy Unlimited subscribers retain access through 11.30.2026.

Free. 125 credits once at signup, enough for two 5-second Gen-4.5 videos, with no later top-up. Every free video has a watermark, exports are only in standard resolution, and the queue has no priority.

Refund. Under the vendor's agreement, all payments are non-refundable; refunds may be issued upon request at its discretion. Canceling a subscription stops the next payment, while credits remain available until the end of the paid period.

Three questions: who owns the videos, what the vendor trained its models on, and why it is being sued.

Whose videos. Yours: the vendor's agreement does not claim rights to your materials or outputs and does not restrict their commercial use on any plan, from monetized YouTube to advertising, and you do not have to credit Runway. There is one catch on the free plan, a watermark on every video. The other side of the same agreement clause: Runway may use your uploads and outputs to train its models under a perpetual, irrevocable license; the documents have no opt-out button, and the vendor sells its promise not to train on customer data only to Enterprise companies, together with protection against third-party claims.

What it was trained on. On Jul 25, 2024, 404 Media published a leaked internal training-data spreadsheet for the Gen-3 model containing thousands of YouTube videos and pirated films. CTO Anastasis Germanidis replied that an in-house research team handles training using curated internal datasets. This story led to two lawsuits against Runway in New York in 2026, both over YouTube videos: the consolidated Ace Cam and Businessing case, which the court classified as personal-injury claims, and the Gardner case, moved from California to New York in May 2026.

Court cases. Runway has been a defendant since Jan 13, 2023 in artists' case against Stability AI and Midjourney over training on their works; the case is in fact discovery, and sources give different trial dates. As of Sep 7, 2026, none of the three disputes has a ruling. The vendor agreement is governed by New York law, disputes are heard by New York courts, the service is available from age 13, and under 18 with parental permission.

Data. The company sits in the US and under its policy moves your data there and to other countries.

Who is nearby. Lionsgate has been a Runway partner since Sep 18, 2024 and acquired a stake on Jun 17, 2026 with no cash changing hands, in exchange for the partnership; the vendor itself names AMC Networks and Stephen Colbert's show as customers, while Bloomberg reports that Netflix used Runway for visual effects in the series “El Eternauta”. General Atlantic, NVIDIA, Adobe, and AMD provide funding; TechCrunch estimates the company has raised 860 million $ since 2018.

The real choice is not whose model draws better but what you do with the clip after generation: Kling hands you a finished video, while Runway sells the desk where you rework it. For controlling a scene with keyframes, compare it with Luma AI.

If you need a sequence of transitions between photos, compare it with Pikaframes mode. It builds motion between ordered keyframes.

If instead of shot footage you have photos of a character and a voice sample, check out Vidu generator modes. The card covers working from references and the rights to uploaded materials.

To transfer a finished dance onto a character from an image, try Viggle AI; its card covers this use case and the terms of free access.

Kling. A Chinese video model with its own site: the entry plan is $10 a month for 660 credits, plus free daily credits and sound right in the clip, which Gen-4.5 does not have. Take Kling if you need one strong model for less and with speech; take Runway if you edit finished video, build a campaign with the agent or want to switch between your own Gen-4.5 and third-party models. Kling 3.0 itself has been inside Runway since 20.02.2026.

Higgsfield. A neighbor in the same area that went further down the same path: it has no base video model of its own, but bundles a dozen third-party models under subscriptions from $19. The axis between them is this: Runway's third-party-model storefront grew alongside its Gen-4.5 and Aleph editor, while for Higgsfield the storefront is the product.

Sora. is listed in our catalog as a closed product, while Sora 2 Pro has been available inside Runway since 20.02.2026. Google sells Veo 3.1 through a Gemini subscription, and the same model is available in Runway for 40 credits per second with sound.

Over eight years, the company went from a wrapper for third-party models through co-authoring Stable Diffusion to its own video models, then in 2026 became a storefront for third-party models again, now alongside its own Gen-4.5.