Runway Text to Video Pricing

Gen-4.5 generates 2 to 10 second clips at 720p, 24 or 25 fps. Text-to-video is 16:9 at 1280×720 only — the other aspect ratios are image-to-video. 4K is available through upscaling rather than generation, at 2 credits a second on paid plans.

The first thing people get wrong: the free plan is not a free text-to-video tier. It grants 125 credits that never renew, and its only video model is Gen-4 Turbo, which needs an input image. Everything generated on it carries a Runway watermark.

The second: monthly credits are use-them-or-lose-them on Standard and Pro. They reset within 24 hours of the billing date. If your work is lumpy — a busy fortnight then nothing — the effective rate is worse than the table suggests, and the calculation to run is what you spend on a slow month, not a busy one.

On character consistency, Runway is honest in its docs and worth reading carefully. Its Gen-4 Image References model handles up to three references with @name tagging and is genuinely good at holding a character across images. The Gen-4.5 video model takes text or one image; Runway's own documentation says support for additional inputs is coming. So multi-shot consistency on Runway today is a manual two-stage workflow: build each keyframe with image references, then image-to-video each keyframe separately.

A credit is $0.0025 at the Starter rate and video bills per second at each model's own rate, with no subscription floor. A five-second clip is $0.23 on Grok Imagine Video, $0.81 on PixVerse C1, $1.57 on Kling V3.0 and $5.00 on Veo 3.1 — the same Veo 3.1 that costs $2.40 to $4.80 for five seconds on Runway Standard credits.

The structural difference is where character consistency lives. Seven of the ten published models here take character references at the video stage — three to nine per shot — so a multi-shot sequence is one pipeline rather than a hand-assembled two-stage workflow. That is the trade Reelfo is making; Runway trades the other way and gets a far better editing suite for it.

And credits do not reset. A month where you generate nothing costs nothing, and the balance is still there when you come back.

Signing up puts 100 credits in your account, once, with no card. For a typical short story that is enough to go from your idea to a storyboard — the story brief, the script, the cast images and the shot plan — or, if you would rather, about 16 images in the image studio. A longer script or a bigger cast can use it up first, and the video itself is bought with credits.