The free tier column, and what a blank plan card means

The free tier column records what a vendor's free plan says about commercial use. Five of the seventeen vendors withhold it there and five grant it outright; the rest publish no free plan, no plans at all, or no statement either way. As of 2026-09-12.

Inclusion rule. Vendors whose free plan can be read from a public English page. A vendor without a free plan keeps its row, recording that the question does not arise rather than being dropped. Order. Rows carrying a reading first, and the rows recording that nothing is published on either side after them, then alphabetically by vendor inside each group.

1A line that is missing is itself a reading

Three rows in this column come from something a plan card does not say. Kling AI prints its commercial use line on every paid membership and leaves it off Basic. Runway and Pika do the same on their free columns, and Pika carries the omission one plan further up. None of the three writes a prohibition anywhere; the finding is the shape of the card.

Leaving those rows blank would read as though nobody had asked. A buyer about to ship footage generated on a free login needs to know that the vendor addressed commercial use on the plans above and declined to address it here. That is a different piece of information from an unasked question, and the column is built to keep the two apart.

2Two vendors write the exclusion out instead

LTX Studio states the boundary in words: its free and Lite licence excludes promotional activity for a business, a service or a product. That sentence settles the cases three omissions leave a reader guessing at, including a founder's own launch post, a showreel used to win work, and a clip on a company channel with no media spend behind it. Fliki is blunter still, listing its free plan as carrying no commercial rights to media.

Where a vendor defines the exclusion, this column carries the definition. Where it only uses the label, the column carries the label and stops there. That difference decides how far anyone can act on a row without opening the vendor's own document, so printing the two the same way would quietly destroy the more useful of them.

3Five free tiers grant it, and charge in another currency

Higgsfield states that commercial rights follow from its terms for all users, which puts its free seat on the same footing as its paid ones. Leonardo.Ai lets a free user download their own generations for commercial usage and keeps those concepts publicly viewable for other users to copy and remix. HeyGen's grant names no plan, so the free login inherits it. Synthesia allows training and product videos on your own site at any price and rules out paid promotion with a stock avatar. SceneMixer's rights guide counts output made with free credits as paid for, commercial use included.

None of those five is free in the sense a buyer expects. Three take a visible mark, one takes exclusivity, one takes the media buy. The column records what the free tier carries on commercial use and the third column records how that reading was reached, because on this half of the grid the cost has moved somewhere a price list cannot show it.

4What a withheld free tier still does not settle

A free plan that withholds commercial use says nothing about clips already generated under it. Whether a later upgrade reaches back over earlier output is a question about when the licence attaches, and no plan card read for this column raises it. The row records the plan position and leaves the timing to the contract and to whoever is reading it for a signature.

The two rows with no free plan are worth reading as a fact about the pricing model rather than about permission. With those vendors the cheapest way to generate anything already sits on a plan that carries the line, so the sequence this register was built to catch, generate first and read the licence afterwards, has nowhere to start. Three further rows have no plans of any kind, because what is published is a set of model weights and a licence file.

• Free tier
  The free and Lite plans are described as a personal use licencepersonal use onlyLTX Studio, pricing / recorded 2026-09-12
• What personal use rules out
  The personal use licence is described as excluding promotional activity for a business, service or productin the vendor's wordsLTX Studio, pricing / recorded 2026-09-12
• Free tier
  The free Basic plan does not carry that lineby omissionKling AI, membership plans / recorded 2026-09-12
• Free tier
  Commercial use is not included on the free plan or on the $8 Standard planread from the plan feature iconsPika, pricing / recorded 2026-09-12
• Free tier
  The free plan does not carry a commercial use lineby omissionRunway, pricing / recorded 2026-09-12
• Free tier
  No free plan appears on the pricing pagenone offeredinvideo AI, pricing / recorded 2026-09-12
• Free tier
  No free plan appears in the plan listabsent from the page as readLuma, pricing / recorded 2026-09-12
• Commercial use
  Output is the user's to the extent the law allows, royalty-free and commercial use included, and output made with free credits counts as paid forgranted with no plan namedSceneMixer, rights guide / recorded 2026-10-13

5Sources

Every row restates a reading already held on commercial use and on the vendor page it came from, checked 2026-09-12. What a sentence has to do before it counts as a licence statement is set out on the reading page. This column is a filing decision, not legal advice. The other columns: Commercial use from, What is owned.