Runway

What Runway actually is

• Gen-4.5 is the flagship: text-to-video and image-to-video, durations of 2 to 10 seconds, and the only one of the three big models that reaches 10 seconds in a single generation
• Native audio on Gen-4.5 since December 2025
• The watermark disappears from Standard upward
• Runway also hosts third-party models inside the same credit economy: veo3.1, seedance2, gemini_omni_flash
• API credit rates per second: gen4.5 is 12, gen4_turbo 5, aleph2 28, veo3.1 with audio 40, veo3.1 without audio 20, veo3.1_fast with audio 15, seedance2 at 1080p 40

Limits and catches

• The pricing page sells credits, not clips, and never converts to a cost per video
• Subscription credits cost more than API credits: $12 for 625 credits works out at about $0.019 per credit, against $0.01 in the developer portal
• At the published API rate of 12 credits per second, a single 10 second clip on gen4.5 costs 120 credits, so the Standard subscription covers roughly five such clips per month
• The free credits arrive once and never renew
• Runway uses inputs and outputs to train its models by default
• Independent breakdowns from July 2026 cite a higher in-app rate (25 credits per second) for Gen-4.5 than the API rate of 12, and Runway does not publish the in-app rate on the pricing page

What does Runway cost?

Not really. The 'Free plan' hands you 125 credits once. They never expire, but they never refresh either. At the published API rate of 12 credits per second for gen4.5 that is about ten seconds of video, once. Everything you make on Free carries a Runway watermark.

Prices verified July 2026, we re-check every 60 days.