# Runway — Generative video, image and audio models in a web studio, an API and an MCP server.

> Source: AgentsIndex — https://agentsindex.ai/runway (structured, researched, re-verified)
> Facts last verified: 2026-10-24

Runway is an AI media platform that generates video, images, voice and sound effects from text, images and reference material. The same models are reachable through a web app, a pay-as-you-go developer API and an MCP server for AI agents.

| Fact | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Website | https://runwayml.com/ |
| Price | free, then from $15/month billed monthly, $12/month billed annually |
| Free tier | Yes |

Free plan is described as "Free forever" at $0/month but grants 125 one-time credits rather than a monthly allowance, with only "a selection of generative creative models" and 5GB asset storage. The developer API is separately free to start with no credit card, billed per use thereafter.

## What it costs to start

**What the price counts** · Yes — Three meters run side by side: a flat monthly fee that buys a credit allowance on individual plans, a per-seat monthly fee on Team, and true pay-as-you-go per second or per image on the developer API.

> 625 credits monthly = 52s of Gen-4.5, 104s of Gen-4 Turbo, or 78 Gen-4 Images (1080p).
> — https://runway.com/pricing · Individual tab, Standard plan card, credit allowance line

**Free tier** · Yes — A standing $0 plan exists and the vendor calls it free forever, but the credit grant is one time rather than monthly, so sustained use requires paying.

> Free forever. For people looking to explore Runway's AI Tools $0 /month 125 credits 125 one-time credits to explore Runway's AI tools.
> — https://runway.com/pricing · Individual tab, Free plan card

**Self-serve signup** · Yes — Individual plans are bought directly from the pricing page and the developer API begins without a sales call; only Team at scale and Enterprise route through Contact Sales.

> Get started free, no credit card required
> — https://runway.com/pricing · API tab, Pay as you go card, closing line

**Card to start** · No — The developer API states plainly that no credit card is needed to begin, and the Free web plan is entered through a Start Free button rather than a checkout.

> Get started free, no credit card required
> — https://runway.com/pricing · API tab, Pay as you go card, closing line

**Contract** · Partly — Individual plans can be bought month to month, but the advertised headline rates are the annual ones, every subscription auto-renews for an equal period, and Team starts at two seats.

> After your initial subscription period, and again after any subsequent subscription period, your subscription will automatically commence on the first day following the end of such period and continue for an additional equivalent period, at Company's then-current price for such subscription.
> — https://runway.com/terms-of-use · Section 8.4 Automatic Renewal

**Cancel any time** · Partly — You cancel yourself from the Plans and Billing page with no exit fee, but the vendor keeps the remainder of the paid period and states that fees are non-refundable with no prorated refund.

> You may cancel or change your subscription by logging into your Account and going to the "Plans & Billing" page. If you cancel your subscription, you may use your subscription until the end of your then-current subscription term
> — https://runway.com/terms-of-use · Section 8.4 Automatic Renewal, cancellation paragraph

## What it works with

**Works with** · Yes — The MCP FAQ names the assistants and editors it connects to by product, and the connection is account-level rather than gated per integration once the plan includes MCP.

> You can use Runway MCP in ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Claude Desktop, Grok Bot, Cursor, Replit and other apps that support MCP (Model Context Protocol).
> — https://runway.com/mcp · Frequently asked questions, "What agents can connect to Runway MCP?"

**Public API** · Yes — A public developer API is documented with an OpenAPI reference, Node and Python SDKs and a go-live checklist, and it is sold as its own pay-as-you-go product line alongside the web plans.

> Runway Dev lets you bring our most powerful and popular generative models directly into your apps, products, platforms and websites.
> — https://docs.dev.runwayml.com/ · Opening paragraph above the Models section

**MCP server** · Partly — A real hosted MCP server exists and needs no API key, but the pricing table lists Runway MCP only as a Pro and Max feature, so Standard and Free subscribers do not get it.

> Generate high-quality images and videos right from where you're already working. Use Runway in ChatGPT, Claude, Grok Bot, Cursor and other compatible agents.
> — https://runway.com/mcp · Runway MCP page, hero paragraph

## What it does on its own

**Acts on its own** · Yes — The vendor describes one prompt producing a finished multi-shot commercial, with the system choosing scenes, continuity and even the model, rather than a person approving each generation step.

> Drop in a photo, describe the spot and Runway shoots every scene in the same kitchen and the same light. One prompt, one finished commercial.
> — https://runway.com/mcp · "A complete generation studio, inside your agent" section, Product ads panel

**Limits on what it may do** · Partly — Governance controls over what the system may do exist but sit on the paid team tiers: roles, sharing policies and third-party model configuration are Team and Enterprise rows, not individual plan features.

> User roles & permissions Sharing policies Custom SSO 3P model configuration Tiered-admin management
> — https://runway.com/pricing · Team & Enterprise tab, Team plan, ADMIN, SECURITY & COMPLIANCE block

**No code needed** · Yes — The main route in is a web app and a chat plugin driven by plain prompts, and the vendor states explicitly that connecting an assistant needs no API key or developer setup.

> No. In ChatGPT, Grok Bot and Cursor, add the Runway plugin and sign in. In other agents, add the Runway MCP URL to your agent settings, then sign in with your Runway app account.
> — https://runway.com/mcp · Frequently asked questions, "Is an API key required?"

## What happens to your data

**No training on your data** · Partly — The default is the opposite: the Terms grant Runway a license to train on your inputs and outputs, and no training on your data appears only as an Enterprise plan row.

> You acknowledge that Inputs and Outputs may be used by the Company to train and improve its AI models, algorithms and related technology, products and services (including for labeling, classification, content moderation and model training purposes).
> — https://runway.com/terms-of-use · Section 4.4 User Inputs and Outputs

**Retention you control** · Partly — Retention is set by the vendor for self-serve users, who can only delete an account or file a privacy request; a zero-data-retention option is published as an Enterprise commitment.

> Support for zero-data retention
> — https://runway.com/pricing · API tab, Enterprise card, "Everything in Pay as you go, plus" list

**Data stays in your region** · No — The privacy policy states that using the service means consenting to processing and transfer in the United States and other countries where vendors operate, and offers no region to select.

> We are headquartered in the United States and may use vendors or service providers that operate in other countries. By using the Service, or providing us with any information, you consent to the collection, processing, maintenance, and transfer of such information in and to the United States and other applicable countries
> — https://runway.com/privacy-policy · International data transfer section

**Open source** · No — The Terms reserve all rights in the Services to the company and forbid decompiling or reverse engineering any part of them; the public GitHub repository holds agent skills and examples, not the models.

> you shall not modify, translate, adapt, merge, make derivative works of, disassemble, decompile, reverse compile or reverse engineer any part of the Services
> — https://runway.com/terms-of-use · Section 1.3 Certain Restrictions, clause

**Take your data out** · Partly — A right to data portability and account deletion are published for personal information, but the Terms disclaim any obligation to store your content and no bulk asset export is documented.

> Right to data portability; and Right to information about financial incentives that we offer to you, if any
> — https://runway.com/privacy-policy · Additional US state-specific and other jurisdiction-specific rights, rights list

## Whether a company can buy it

**Security audits** · Yes — Two independent certifications are named and dated as maintained: SOC 2 Type II with annual recertification, and ISO/IEC 27001 issued by an accredited body, both requestable through a trust center.

> Runway maintains SOC 2 Type II certification, validating our security controls through rigorous independent auditing.
> — https://runway.com/data-security · Compliance & Certifications, SOC 2 Certification subsection

**Single sign-on** · Partly — Single sign-on through your own identity provider is a Team and Enterprise row listed as Custom SSO; the individual Free, Standard, Pro and Max plans do not carry it.

> Custom SSO
> — https://runway.com/pricing · Team & Enterprise tab, Team plan, ADMIN, SECURITY & COMPLIANCE block

**Audit log** · Partly — The security page claims detailed audit trails of platform activity and logs kept for user-activity auditing, but these are described as internal security controls; the only customer-facing equivalent is usage reporting on Team.

> Comprehensive Logging: Detailed audit trails of all platform activity
> — https://runway.com/data-security · Product Security, Platform Architecture bullet list

**Uptime promise** · Partly — An uptime commitment is offered only as an Enterprise term alongside the MSA; self-serve plans get a public status page and an as-is warranty disclaimer instead.

> Support and uptime SLAs
> — https://runway.com/pricing · API tab, Enterprise card, "Everything in Pay as you go, plus" list

## What is Runway?

Runway is an AI video creation platform for creative teams that combines generation, editing, and transformation in one interface. It supports prompts, text, images, and existing footage, with Runway Agent, Gen-4.5, Aleph, Act-Two, Visual Effects, and Build the Workflows for repeatable production. It's used by Amazon, UCLA, and NVIDIA. Plans run Free $0, Standard $12/year, Pro $28/year, Unlimited $76/year, and Enterprise custom.

## Runway sells one model stack through three front doors

Runway AI, Inc. describes itself as "building foundational Real-World Intelligence that can understand, simulate and act in the world", and what a buyer actually purchases is access to generative media models. The same stack is sold three ways, and which door you pick changes the price, the controls and the contract.

The first is the web app and mobile apps, bought as Free, Standard, Pro and Max plans with a monthly credit allowance. The second is [Runway Dev](https://docs.dev.runwayml.com/), a developer API with Node and Python SDKs, an OpenAPI reference and a go-live checklist, billed per use. The third is [Runway MCP](https://runway.com/mcp), a hosted MCP server that puts generation inside an assistant you already use.

Notably, the model list is not all Runway's own. The plan cards and the MCP page name Gen-4.5, Aleph 2.0 and Gen-4 Turbo beside Seedance 2.5, Kling 3.0, Veo 3.1, GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana Pro, and the API tab sells this as "Single vendor, unified billing across every model". Runway trains and serves its own models and resells others through the same meter.

## The MCP server is the agent surface, and it is a Pro feature

The MCP server is real, documented and specific. It is listed in the ChatGPT app directory, and the FAQ names [ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Claude Desktop, Grok Bot, Cursor and Replit](https://runway.com/mcp) as supported clients. Setup is three steps and the vendor is explicit that there is no developer work: asked whether an API key is required, the answer is "No. In ChatGPT, Grok Bot and Cursor, add the Runway plugin and sign in."

Two details matter more than the integration list. First, billing: "MCP uses your Runway credits, just like the Runway app", so an agent generating video is spending the same allowance as a person in the editor, with no separate budget or cap of its own. Second, entitlement. The marketing page offers MCP to anyone with "compatible agents", but the [pricing table](https://runway.com/pricing) lists Runway MCP as a feature of Pro and Max only. It does not appear in the Standard or Free feature lists. A buyer reading the MCP page alone would reasonably expect a $15 plan to reach it.

The developer API has its own MCP guide for Cursor, Claude Code and Codex, which connects to a Runway Dev account rather than an app subscription. That is a separate path with separate billing.

## Pricing defaults to the annual rate on arrival

The pricing page opens with its Monthly/Yearly control already set to Yearly, with the switch reporting checked and a "-20% off" label beside it. Read without operating the toggle, Standard looks like a $12 product. Clicking Monthly shows the real month-to-month rate of $15, and the annual card carries "Billed annually. Save $36/year." Pro is $35 monthly and Max is $95 monthly, saving $84 and $228 a year respectively when paid up front.

Credits are the unit, and their worth moves with the model. Standard's 625 monthly credits are quoted as "52s of Gen-4.5, 104s of Gen-4 Turbo, or 78 Gen-4 Images (1080p)". Max's 9,500 credits buy 791 seconds of Gen-4.5 or 475 Nano Banana Pro images at 2K. Only Max and Team roll unused credits forward, and only for one month.

The Free plan deserves a careful read. It is labelled "Free forever" at $0 a month, but the grant is "125 one-time credits", not a monthly allowance. It is a standing account rather than a trial, and also a one-shot sample. Team is $69 per seat monthly or $55 billed annually, starts at two users and pools 165,600 credits a year across the workspace. Enterprise is quote-only.

The API is the one genuinely pay-as-you-go path: video from $0.05 per second, images from $0.01 and audio from $0.0025 per second, free to start and with no credit card asked for.

## Training on your inputs is the default

Section 4.4 of the [Terms of Use](https://runway.com/terms-of-use) is the clause to read before uploading client material. Runway does not claim ownership of inputs or outputs, and states it "does not restrict your commercial use of your Outputs", which is unusually clear and applies from the Free plan up. The same clause then grants the company an "irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free" licence to use those inputs and outputs to "train and improve its AI models".

There is no settings toggle offered against this. "No training on your data" appears once on the site, as a row in the Enterprise column of the Team and Enterprise comparison, alongside "Support for zero-data retention" in the API tab's Enterprise card. For everyone on a self-serve plan, the published position is that submitted material may be used for model training.

The [data security page](https://runway.com/data-security) states a "Technical separation between customer content storage and model training systems" and that "Customer content is never used for testing new features or changes". Neither sentence contradicts section 4.4; they describe isolation and test practice, not a training exclusion.

## Certifications are real, the data agreement is not published

Security documentation here is better than most listings of this size. Runway publishes a dated [security page](https://runway.com/data-security), last updated August 2026, and names SOC 2 Type II with annual recertification and ISO/IEC 27001 issued by an accredited body, both requestable through a trust centre. It documents TLS 1.2+ in transit, AES-256 at rest, role-based access with enforced MFA, a private bug bounty programme, external penetration testing, a published subprocessor list and a public status page.

What is absent is the paperwork a procurement team asks for next. GDPR appears as "GDPR Readiness" and CCPA as "CCPA/CPRA Controls", which are statements of alignment rather than an offer to sign a data processing agreement. No DPA is published or named anywhere on the site. Legal indemnification and "Enterprise terms & MSA" are Team and Enterprise rows.

Data location is fixed. The [privacy policy](https://runway.com/privacy-policy) states that Runway is headquartered in the United States, may use vendors in other countries, and that using the service constitutes consent to transfer "in and to the United States and other applicable countries in which the privacy laws may not be as comprehensive". No region can be chosen. Retention is set by the vendor "for only as long as necessary", with face scans and voiceprints held no longer than three years from last interaction.

## Who should look elsewhere

A team that needs its material kept out of model training cannot get that on a self-serve plan at any price. Standard, Pro and Max all sit under the same section 4.4 licence, and the exclusion is an Enterprise negotiation. The same is true of an uptime commitment, zero-data retention, single sign-on and admin roles: each is a Team or Enterprise row, so a small studio with compliance obligations is pushed into a sales conversation rather than a plan.

Anyone budgeting tightly should model the credit maths before subscribing. Because a credit buys different amounts of output depending on model and resolution, and because MCP and the editor draw on the same pool, a month of experimentation can exhaust an allowance with no published calculator to predict it. Top-ups are available from Pro upward, which makes overspend easy and forecasting harder.

Buyers expecting the MCP server at the entry price should check the plan table rather than the MCP page. And a team hoping to self-host, or to inspect the models, will find neither: the Terms forbid reverse engineering the service, and nothing on the site discusses customer-run deployment in either direction.

## How much does Runway cost?

| Plan | Price | What's included |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free | $0 | Generative Video; Generative Image; Gemini 2.5; Image Apps; Generative Audio; Text to Speech; Audio Apps; 3 video editor projects; 5GB asset storage; No Gen-4 Video; Includes 125 credits (one time) |
| Standard | $12 | Everything in Free and.; Access to all Apps; Ability to run Workflows; Generative Video; Aleph (Video Editing); Gen-4 (Image to Video); Act-Two (Performance Capture); Veo 3; Video Apps; Access to all third party image models (BFL FLUX.2 [max], Seedream 5.0 and more); Upscale resolution; All video models; Remove watermarks; All video models; Credits refresh monthly; No rate restrictions; Buy more credits; 100GB asset storage; Unlimited video editor projects; Technical support via Runway dashboard |
| Pro | $28 | Everything in Standard and.; Create Custom Voices for Lip Sync and Text to Speech; 500GB asset storage |
| Unlimited | $76 | Everything in Pro and.; Explore Mode |
| Enterprise | Contact Us | Scalable for large organizations; Includes all Pro Plan features, plus:; Single sign-on; Custom credit amounts; Configurable organization and team spaces to organize users and assets; Security and compliance; Enterprise-wide onboarding; Ongoing success program; Priority support; Integration with internal tools; Workspace Analytics |

## Frequently asked questions

**What is Runway?**

Runway is an AI video creation platform for creative teams that combines generation, editing, and transformation in one interface. It supports prompts, text, images, and existing footage, with Runway Agent, Gen-4.5, Aleph, Act-Two, Visual Effects, and Build the Workflows for repeatable production. It's used by Amazon, UCLA, and NVIDIA. Plans run Free $0, Standard $12/year, Pro $28/year, Unlimited $76/year, and Enterprise custom.

**How much does Runway cost? Is it free?**

Runway has a free plan, with paid tiers including Standard at $12, Pro at $28, Unlimited at $76.

**What is Runway used for? Who is it for?**

Runway is used for Runway Agent, Gen-4.5, and Edit, Transform and Generate Video. It's built for Video production teams, Marketing teams, and Studios and agencies.

**Does Runway have an API and what does it integrate with?**

Runway doesn't publish a public API. It integrates with Amazon, History Channel, Under Armour, Lionsgate, Tribeca Festival.

**Our take:** Check whether you need the public API before committing: the site does not publish a general API, while Enterprise adds internal-tool integration and workspace analytics. If your production stack depends on programmatic access, verify the exact Enterprise scope first.

## What changed

- 2026-10-24 — Free tier · Price · What it does

## Keeping it current

These facts are re-checked against Runway's own pages and updated when they change. If you represent Runway, sign in and update the listing from your dashboard at https://agentsindex.ai/dashboard. The operations this site accepts from an agent are listed at https://agentsindex.ai/.well-known/agents.json — that catalog needs no key to read, and each entry states its own auth.