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The unlimited plan has a date on it.

Runway's Unlimited plan runs until August 31 and becomes Max on September 1. If you pay annually, your decision is due this month, and what goes away is the part that let you look before you knew.

THE SHORT VERSION

A plan is ending on a date, and the thing it is quietly taking with it is the habit of looking without counting.

•  Runway's Unlimited plan runs as it is through August 31. On September 1 it becomes Max.

•  Monthly subscribers move across automatically at the same 95 dollars a month. Annual subscribers have a choice to make, and it is happening this month: move to Max, or take a refund for the remaining months.

•  Max is credit based. It carries 9,500 credits a month, and unused credits roll over for one month only.

•  Honest framing: the change was announced back in June. Nothing is breaking today. What is live today is the deadline, which is a different thing and is the reason to read it now.

Pricing news is usually the least interesting thing a tool company does, and I would normally leave it to the invoice. This one is worth twenty minutes because of what sits underneath the numbers. A plan is not only a price. It is a permission, and this plan gave permission to do something most working processes quietly depend on.

If you pay yearly, there is also a plain administrative reason to read now. The choice between moving across and taking a refund is yours to make in August, and a decision left alone becomes a decision made for you on the first of September.

August 31 is the last day the Unlimited plan behaves the way it does now. September 1 is the day it becomes Max. If you pay monthly you do not have to do anything, and the price does not move. If you pay for the year, the company has said you may either move to Max or take a refund covering the rest of your term, and that is the piece with your name on it.

Max is described as a credit plan rather than an unmetered one, at 9,500 credits a month with a single month of rollover. The company's stated reason is to keep generation times fast across every plan by moving to a clearer credit structure, which is a reasonable thing to want and also a polite way of saying the unmetered tier was expensive to run.

Read your own account page rather than this paragraph. Plan pages change, terms differ by when you signed, and I am describing what the company has published rather than what your particular subscription says.

The Unlimited plan carried a slower generation mode that did not draw down a balance. You queued something, waited longer than you wanted, and it cost nothing you could feel. That mode is what made the plan worth its price to people who work by looking rather than by planning.

It is not described as part of Max. I want to be careful here, because that is an absence in the published material rather than a sentence anyone has written down, and the two are not the same thing. Check it on your own account before you plan around it, and if you find it stated either way, reply and tell me.

If it is going, the loss is not really the generations. It is that trying something you cannot justify in advance stops costing nothing, and that is the move most people use to find the shot they did not know they wanted.

When exploring costs nothing, a vague brief is survivable. You generate thirty, look at them, and the looking tells you what you meant. Take that away and the discovery has to happen somewhere else, which means it has to happen in writing, before the first generation.

In practice that is a small change with a large effect. Decide the shot before you ask for it: what is in frame, what the camera does, where the light comes from, how long the take runs. Separate the parts that must come back identical from the parts you are still choosing between, and only let a batch vary along one of those at a time. A batch that varies three things at once cannot teach you which one worked.

The uncomfortable part is that this is better practice anyway. Unmetered exploring hides a weak brief rather than removing the need for one, and paying by the credit only makes the bill for that visible.

Paste this, then describe the clip you want in whatever loose words you already have. It is written to argue with you rather than agree.

I will describe a video clip I want, loosely. Turn it into a shot I could order once. First, list every decision my description leaves open, in plain words, one per line. Second, for each one, say whether leaving it open is a real creative choice or just something I have not decided yet. Third, write the clip back to me as a single brief in two parts: the things that must come back identical, and the one thing I am deliberately leaving loose. Use only what I told you. Do not add mood words I did not use, and do not invent a setting, a lens or a light source I did not name. If my description is too vague to write the first part honestly, say so and ask me the fewest questions that would fix it.

The second step is the one that earns its place. Most loose briefs are not artistic openness, they are undecided, and separating those two is what turns thirty hopeful generations into three deliberate ones.

THE NEXT WORKING NOTE

Still finishing the costed batch sheet: how I now plan a run of clips when each one draws down a balance, including the two places I stopped batching entirely and went back to one at a time.

Want it when it ships? Reply with send me the costed batch sheet and I will get it to you.

A QUESTION FOR YOU

How much of your good work came from wandering?

Reply with one shot you would never have found if every attempt had been costed. If enough of you have the same answer, that is worth writing about properly, because it is an argument for keeping some unmetered tool in the stack on purpose.

If this was useful, forward it to whoever pays the studio invoice.