Artlist in 2026: Real Pricing, the Licence Rule Most Guides Get Backwards, and What the AI Suite Actually Costs
Every figure and licence claim below was re-checked against Artlist's own pricing page, licence documents and help centre on 6 August 2026. No third-party "best tools" roundups were used.
This post was first published in December 2025. When it was re-verified eight months later, roughly half of it was wrong - so this is a rewrite, not a patch. If you read the old version, the section immediately below is the part you need.
What changed since the December 2025 version of this post
Four things, in order of how badly they could hurt you:
- The licence claim was backwards. The old version said assets downloaded during your subscription are yours forever. Artlist's licence says the opposite for music, SFX, footage and templates. What is perpetual is a project you published while subscribed - not the asset. Details below, because this is a legal exposure, not a rounding error.
- Every AI price was wrong, in both directions. Annual AI pricing came down; monthly pricing roughly doubled. The old plan names ("AI Suite 40K/80K/120K") no longer exist.
- The credit model was wrong. Artlist bills AI video per second, not per clip, and voiceover per character, not per minute. The old article's "80 HD videos from 40,000 credits" was off by roughly an order of magnitude for the models most people pick.
- Artlist repositioned. It now describes itself as a creative AI platform with a stock catalogue attached, not a music library with AI bolted on. The AI surface is far bigger than the three features the old post described.
What did not change: the stock plan prices. Music & SFX Social at $9.99, Music & SFX Pro at $24.92, Artlist Max at $39.99 - all still exactly right eight months on. The free tier still exists too. The rot was concentrated entirely in AI pricing and licence terms.
The licence rule: publish while subscribed
This is the single most important thing on this page, and it is the thing the old version of this article got wrong.
Artlist's current licences (Pro licence effective 15 February 2026, Social licence effective 4 January 2026) say you may download assets and use them in new projects and publish them only during your paid subscription term. Once the subscription expires, those assets cannot go into any new project - and that explicitly includes edits and adaptations of projects you already made.
So:
| What | Still licensed after you cancel? |
|---|---|
| A video you finished and published while subscribed | Yes, forever, including monetisation |
| Downloaded music, SFX, footage, templates | No - not in new projects, not in re-edits |
| AI-generated output (image, video, voiceover, music) | Yes, that stays yours permanently |
| A voice clone you created | No - the clone itself is not yours and stops working when the plan ends |
If you cancel after one month and keep cutting new videos from your downloaded library, you are out of licence. That is the trap, and it is easy to fall into precisely because so many guides describe Artlist the way this post used to.
Social vs Pro: what each one actually covers
The Social licence is both more generous and more restricted than the old version of this post claimed.
More generous: it covers one channel on each of YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Twitch, plus one podcast - not one channel in total. Monetisation and sponsorships on your own channels are allowed.
More restricted: Social explicitly excludes client work, paid and promoted videos, and broadcast. It also forbids projects intended for upload or embedding on third-party channels for promotion. If you are a freelancer cutting videos for a client, or running paid ads, you need Pro - Social will not cover you.
Clearlist: do this or lose YouTube monetisation
Content ID protection on Artlist is not automatic, and the old version of this post implied it was.
You have to add your channel URL, or individual video URLs, to Artlist's Clearlist while your subscription is active. Artlist's licence is blunt about the consequence: if you don't, you may receive claims from Artlist Ltd, you will not be able to monetise those videos, and you will not be reimbursed for monetisation lost while your channel was unlisted.
Two more things worth knowing:
- Once your plan expires you can no longer add anything to the Clearlist. Do it before you cancel.
- You are separately forbidden from registering Artlist assets, or your projects containing them, in Content ID yourself.
Source: Understanding Artlist's licence.
Pricing, as of 6 August 2026
Artlist's pricing page now splits into two tabs - AI Suite and Stock Catalog - and AI is the default tab. That structural change is itself the story: the plan you probably want depends on which tab you belong in.
All prices below are USD, pre-VAT, as shown to an unauthenticated visitor in the US.
AI Suite tab
| Credits/month | Billed annually (per month) | Billed monthly | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7,500 | $9.99 | $15.99 | AI Starter entry tier - voiceover generation only |
| 16,500 | $11.99 | $19.99 | AI Starter |
| 40,000 | $23.99 | $39.99 | |
| 80,000 | $41.67 | $69.99 | AI Creator |
| 120,000 | $59.99 | $99.99 | |
| 500,000 | $239.99 | $399.99 | AI Professional |
Artlist also lists AI Pro Plus and Custom Business tiers above these.
Note the direction of travel since December 2025: the annual price of the 40,000-credit plan fell from $29.99 to $23.99, while monthly billing on the 80,000-credit plan went from $64.99 to $69.99 and the 120,000-credit plan from $79.99 to $99.99. The gap between monthly and annual is now roughly 40% - the page advertises "Save 40%" - so the old complaint that "you can't pay monthly" has been replaced by a different one: monthly costs you about double.
The standalone "AI Voiceover" plan from the old article is gone. Its replacement is the 7,500-credit AI Starter tier, which generates voiceover only.
Stock Catalog tab
| Plan | Billed annually (per month) | Billed monthly | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Music & SFX Social | $9.99 | $14.99 | Music + SFX, Social licence (see above) |
| Music & SFX Pro | $24.92 | annual only | Music, SFX, Stems, Pro licence |
| Max Social | $29.99 | $59.99 | Max catalogue on a Social licence |
| Artlist Max | $39.99 | $79.99 | Everything, plus 7,500-120,000 AI credits depending on tier |
| Max RAW/LOG | $59.99 | $119.99 | Max plus RAW and LOG footage downloads |
| Max Teams | $67.98 | - | Up to 7 seats total |
| Max Business | $399 - $1,749/mo (annual) | - | Required for companies of 50+, agencies, broadcasters |
A note on the odd cents: $24.92 and $41.67 are annual totals divided by twelve ($299/year and $499.99/year respectively), not month-to-month prices. Artlist Max is $479.88/year. Max RAW/LOG is $719.88/year.
Artlist Max is sold as a credit range, not a fixed allowance. The old article said "everything + 5K AI credits". Artlist now describes Max as "7,500 to 120,000 credits per month", with $39.99 buying the low end and higher-credit Max tiers costing more. Max also now includes AI Music and Artlist Studio, neither of which existed when this post was first written.
What I could not confirm
Per the accuracy rules for this site, these are unverified and I have not substituted plausible-looking replacements:
- The Footage & Templates plan. It is still named in Artlist's pricing FAQ but does not appear in the stock plan comparison and no consumer price is published. The old article's $31.99 is unverified. Treat it as a legacy plan and ask Artlist directly.
- Per-seat team pricing. Artlist publishes team plan totals but not a per-seat breakdown, so the old "$14-34/person/month" figure is gone rather than corrected. What is documented: Max Teams and Music & SFX Teams give you a Pro licence and let you add 2 to 7 seats, and are restricted to companies with fewer than 50 employees globally; members share one subscription and may use each other's downloads for team projects; and any company with 50+ employees, plus any agency or broadcaster, is required to be on Max Business or Enterprise.
- Catalogue sizes. Artlist no longer publishes a track count, an asset count, or a headline 8K figure that I could find. The stock footage browser offers a "4K+" filter and a "Raw & Log" filter, not an 8K claim. The old article's "30,000 tracks", "900K+ assets" and "8K resolution" claims have been removed rather than updated.
Who should buy what
- You only need music and SFX for your own channels: Music & SFX Social, $9.99/month annual. Remember it does not cover client work.
- You do client or sponsored work: you need a Pro licence. Music & SFX Pro at $24.92, or Artlist Max at $39.99 if you want footage too.
- You mostly want AI generation: buy on the AI Suite tab and size by credits, using the per-second maths below - not by plan name.
- You want both: Artlist Max, but check which credit tier you are actually being sold.
What the AI platform actually is now
The old version of this post described "three main AI features". That is no longer an accurate picture of the product. Artlist now describes itself as a creative AI technology platform, and its AI surface includes:
- AI Toolkit - 70+ mini-apps for image and video tasks
- Artlist Studio - end-to-end AI production
- AI Music - music generation, a whole product the old post never mentioned
- AI Avatars and Characters, plus a Style Kit for consistency
- AI Agent for multi-step generation
- Artlist MCP - connects Claude to Artlist, included from AI Starter upward
Artlist advertises access to "100+ models".
Models: don't trust any list, including this one
The model roster turns over faster than any article can track. As of August 2026 Artlist's own pages name Sora 2 and Sora 2 Pro, Veo 3.1 and Veo 3.1 Lite/Fast, Kling 3.0 / Kling O3 / Kling 2.6, Seedance 2.0 and 2.0 Mini, Seedream 4.5 and 5.0, Nano Banana 2 and Pro, GPT Image 2.0, LTX 2.x, Wan 2.6/2.7, Hailuo/MiniMax H3, Luma Ray 3.2, Flux 3 and Grok Imagine, plus avatar and lipsync models from HeyGen, Omnihuman and Sync.
The old article's per-model duration table has been deleted rather than updated. It listed "Seedance V1 pro", which is two generations old, and a flat 15-second ceiling that no longer holds - Artlist documents a Veo 3.1 Extend option that adds 7 seconds, and Seedance 2.0 accepts up to three input clips totalling 15 seconds. Check Artlist's AI Models section instead. Model availability changes automatically without any plan change on your side.
Credits: per second, and per character
This is where budgeting goes wrong, so it is worth doing the arithmetic properly.
Video is billed per second
| Model and resolution | Credits per second |
|---|---|
| Veo 3.1 Lite, 720p | 63 |
| Kling 2.5 Turbo, 1080p | 150 |
| Sora 2, 720p | 200 |
| Veo 3.1, 1080p with audio | 425 |
| Sora 2 Pro, 1080p | 950 |
| Seedance 2.0, 4K | 1,200 |
That is a spread of more than 15x depending on what you pick. A single five-second Veo 3.1 1080p clip with audio costs about 2,125 credits, so a 40,000-credit plan buys you roughly 18 of them - not the "80 HD videos" the old article promised. If you work in Veo 3.1 Lite at 720p instead, the same five seconds costs about 315 credits and the same plan buys well over a hundred clips.
Budget by model, not by plan name.
Voiceover is billed per character
- Eleven Multilingual v2 and Eleven v2: 1 credit = 5 characters
- MiniMax 02 HD and Cartesia: 1 credit = 10 characters
- Speech-to-Speech: 2 credits per second
- Creating a voice clone: 500 credits (unchanged, and still correct)
There is a 5,000-character cap per generation.
Two gotchas the old post missed
- Credits do not roll over month to month.
- One-off top-ups are the exception, not the rule. On most plans you cannot buy extra credits at all - the only way to get more is to upgrade. Artlist documents one exception: on the AI Suite 80,000 plan or above you can buy one-off top-up credits, and those expire 30 days after purchase rather than sitting in your monthly allowance.
Sources: credits for AI image and video, credits for voiceover.
AI Voiceover, corrected
Three modes: Text to Voice, Speech to Speech, and Voice Cloning.
Languages are model-dependent. Artlist does not publish a single language count, so the old article's "23+ languages" figure has been removed rather than replaced. Custom voices can generate in all supported languages except Swedish. The old claim that Speech-to-Speech is English-only appears obsolete - it is now priced at 2 credits per second with no documented language restriction - but I could not find a positive confirmation either way, so treat it as unconfirmed and test before you build a workflow on it.
Things that are newly documented and useful:
- 5,000-character cap per generation
- Eleven v3 supports audio tags written in
[brackets] - Accent selection is only available on the Cartesia model
Voice cloning specs are mostly unchanged and still correct: MP3, WAV or M4A, maximum 20MB, minimum 10 seconds of source audio, 500 credits to create. The current docs add a 5-minute maximum on the source file.
The important correction is on ownership. Artlist's licence says you do not own the voice clone - you get a limited licence to use it "for as long as you maintain a valid subscription". The clone dies with the plan. Only the audio you already generated stays yours.
On AI training
The old article said Artlist won't use your prompts or generated content to train AI models. That is overstated.
Artlist's Terms of Use say it "contractually prohibits most third-party Model providers" from using data or outputs from Artlist to train or fine-tune their models - but then: "certain models or features may permit such use. Artlist will identify those Models or features in the platform interface." Separately, by supplying inputs you grant Artlist an irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use them to operate, provide and improve the service.
Practical version: check the model in the UI before you feed it anything sensitive. The burden is on you, per model.
The stock libraries
Still the stable, boring, reliable half of the product.
Music. Daily updates, Stems (download vocal, drum and bass tracks separately), a lot of Artlist-exclusive material, and filtering by mood, tempo, instrument and scene. For side project videos, keywords like upbeat tech or minimal inspiring get you there fast. Artlist no longer publishes a track count.
Sound effects. 96kHz 24-bit WAV, categorised into UI sounds, ambient, action effects and so on. Good for app demos and product walkthroughs.
Footage. The browse interface offers a 4K+ filter and a Raw & Log filter. RAW/LOG is no longer a $17.93/month add-on - it is now a separate plan tier, Max RAW/LOG at $59.99/month billed annually versus $39.99 for standard Max. The UI prompts you to upgrade rather than to buy an add-on.
Templates and plugins. Premiere Pro and After Effects templates with customisable colours and fonts, plus 50+ plugins across Premiere Pro, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro. The Artlist Library plugin lets you search, preview and download inside Premiere Pro.
One thing worth knowing before you build a habit: if your subscription lapses, the plugins and tools revert to free, watermarked versions.
Download limits, and no automation
The old article claimed "API available for integration" and "batch download functionality" as developer-friendly features. That is misleading for the individual plans.
Artlist's licence caps downloads at 40 songs, 100 SFX, 40 templates and/or 100 clips per day, and prohibits "downloading Assets by any automatic means, such as software, bots, etc." The Terms of Use separately forbid access via robots, crawlers or scrapers. A Music API does exist, but it is a business offering, not part of these plans.
The genuinely developer-relevant thing is Artlist MCP, which connects Claude to Artlist and is included from AI Starter upward. That is the integration path now.
Tutorial: making a product video with Artlist
Step 1: Plan the structure
Decide your audience (developers or general users), your length (15-60 second social cut, or a 2-5 minute full introduction), and your tone, before you touch the library. Searching without a brief is how you lose an afternoon.
Step 2: Find the music
Keyword starting points:
- Tech products:
tech,innovation,digital,modern - SaaS tools:
corporate,uplifting,inspiring - Creative apps:
creative,playful,energetic - Dev tools:
minimal,ambient,focus
Then filter by mood (Hopeful, Determined), set tempo to 100-120 BPM which suits most product videos, and exclude vocals if you are adding voiceover.
Practical tips: download Stems so you can drop the drums under the voiceover, match the music's intro rhythm to your opening cut, and pull music down to -12dB to -18dB under narration.
Step 3: Sound effects
Search UI, interface, click, notification for interface sounds, and transition, whoosh, impact for transitions and emphasis.
Step 4: AI voiceover
Script length. Roughly 150 words per minute for an English script. Note that this is a words-per-minute figure for English narration specifically. Do not carry the number across languages - Mandarin narration runs closer to 240-300 characters per minute, so scripting a Chinese voiceover to 150 gets you about half the runtime you wanted. (The Chinese version of this article previously made exactly that mistake; it is fixed there too.)
Choose the voice by previewing several against your brand: calm and clear for professional SaaS, younger and livelier for creative apps.
Adjust parameters: 0.9x-1.0x speed usually sounds natural; set emotion to match the content.
Generate in segments rather than one long block - it makes fine-tuning far cheaper, and since you are billed per character, a re-generation of one paragraph costs a fraction of a re-generation of the whole script.
Step 5: B-roll
Useful categories for side projects: people using computers and phones, abstract code and interface shots, team collaboration scenes, city and tech-building aerials.
Search with specific phrases - developer coding laptop beats coding - and keep the visual style consistent across clips. Higher-resolution footage gives you room to crop and reframe.
Step 6: AI-generated visuals
When nothing in the library fits:
Image to Video: upload a product screenshot, add a motion prompt like subtle zoom in, soft parallax movement, and generate a few seconds of movement. Price it per second first - see the credit table above.
Text to Image: abstract gradient technology background, soft blue purple, minimal for backgrounds, or indie hacker working on laptop, modern workspace, illustration style for concept art.
Step 7: Edit
Install the Artlist Library extension, open its panel inside Premiere Pro, and search, preview and download straight to the timeline without switching windows.
Step 8: Add your channel to the Clearlist - before you cancel
This is a required step, not an optional one. Add your YouTube channel URL (or the individual video URLs) to Artlist's Clearlist while your subscription is active. Skip it and you can get copyright claims from Artlist itself, you cannot monetise, and you will not be reimbursed for the monetisation you lost.
Pros and cons
Pros
One place for everything. Music, SFX, footage, templates, plugins and a large AI toolkit under one set of licence terms. Fewer subscriptions to manage.
Stock pricing has been stable. Four prices in this article survived eight months without moving. That is unusual and it counts for something.
AI output is genuinely yours. Unlike the stock assets, AI-generated output stays licensed to you permanently, even after you cancel.
Annual AI pricing came down. The 40,000-credit tier is $6/month cheaper than it was in December 2025.
MCP integration. Artlist MCP connects Claude directly to Artlist from AI Starter upward, which is a real workflow improvement if you already live in a coding agent.
Cons
The licence is a trap if you skim it. Downloaded assets stop being usable in new projects the moment you cancel. Plan your publish schedule around your billing cycle, not the other way round.
Clearlist is a manual step with a hard deadline. Miss it and you lose monetisation with no refund.
Monthly billing costs roughly double. Artlist Max is $39.99/month annual versus $79.99 monthly. AI Creator is $41.67 versus $69.99. The annual discount is around 40%, which makes "try it for a month" expensive.
Credits expire monthly, and below the 80,000 tier they can't be topped up. Run out mid-project on a smaller plan and your only option is a plan upgrade.
AI video is expensive on the good models. A five-second Veo 3.1 1080p clip with audio eats about 2,125 credits. Do the per-second maths before you commit.
Social does not cover client work. If you freelance, you need Pro, and the price difference is real.
Should you use it?
I have deliberately dropped the competitor comparison table that used to sit here. It compared Artlist against Epidemic Sound and Envato Elements using numbers that were eight months old and sourced from third parties, and it presented "perpetual licence" as an Artlist advantage - a contrast that, as shown above, does not exist. Rather than refresh half of a table I could not fully verify, it is gone.
What I can say from Artlist's own pages:
- If you need music only and you publish to your own channels, Music & SFX Social at $9.99/month annual is the cheapest honest answer here. Compare it against Epidemic Sound yourself, on Epidemic Sound's own pricing page.
- If you need footage and templates as well, Artlist Max at $39.99/month annual is the plan that exists and is priced publicly.
- If you are mostly here for AI generation, buy on the AI Suite tab and size by credits, using the per-second table above.
- If you need design assets - stock images, fonts, web templates - Artlist is not that product.
Getting started
- Go to Artlist.io and create a free account.
- Try the free generation credits. Artlist's FAQ confirms you can generate free voiceovers, images, a video and music as a sample.
- Browse the library to check the style suits you. A free account gives you watermarked songs and footage to test with.
- Important caveat: the licence forbids using watermarked trial assets in any project at all. They are for evaluation, not for shipping.
- Pick a plan based on the tables above - and check which tab you are actually on.
Prices, plan structures and licence terms in this article were verified against artlist.io's own pricing page, licence documents and help centre on 6 August 2026. Figures are USD, pre-VAT, as shown to an unauthenticated visitor in the US; your local pricing may differ. Artlist's pricing page also varies some marketing copy between page loads, so treat any headline "up to N videos" claim on their site as approximate. AI pricing on this platform has moved substantially in the last eight months - check the pricing page yourself before you commit.