Onset Engine Pricing

No. Onset Engine is a one-time purchase - you pay once and own your license permanently. All updates within the v1.x series are included at no additional cost. Core is $29.99 and Studio is $59.99 with the current launch discount. There are no monthly fees, no render credits, and no feature gates that require a recurring payment. If we release a major v2.0 rewrite in the future, existing customers will receive a discounted upgrade path.

Most of the engine. New video (one click to a draft of the whole song), all 9 style presets with their built-in effects, clips matched to the music, describing what to show, creating your own drivers, the rhythm bar, beat markers and full library analysis work exactly as they do in the paid tiers. Renders are capped at 720p/30 FPS with a "Created with Onset Engine" watermark, and DJ Mode sessions are limited to 1 minute. The add-on effects (Cutout Pop, Beauty Mode, Smooth Motion, depth effects and Subliminal Text), changing clips on the timeline, and the Core editing tools - Only these, must-use clips, rounds and Length, the energy arc and Learn my taste - are locked. The Demo also saves a separate copy of every clip it finds, so importing is around 4x slower and duplicates footage onto your drive. The comparison table lists every difference. The demo is designed to prove the engine runs on your hardware, and that the AI pipeline delivers, before you spend anything.

Yes - 14-day refund policy through Lemon Squeezy, no questions asked. If Onset Engine doesn't work for your workflow, request a refund within 14 days of purchase and you'll receive a full refund. We recommend trying the free demo first to confirm the software runs on your hardware and that the AI pipeline produces the results you're looking for before purchasing Core or Studio.

Onset Engine runs on any Windows 10/11 PC with 8GB RAM - no GPU required. NVIDIA (GTX 16-series / RTX 20-series or newer, including RTX 50-series) is fastest: AI analysis of your footage runs on the GPU, and NVENC speeds up exports. AMD Radeon is fully supported: exports are hardware-accelerated (AMF), while AI analysis runs on the CPU, so importing new footage takes somewhat longer with Standard analysis and several times longer with High Quality, while editing and rendering are unaffected. Intel-only systems work the same way, with CPU encoding. The engine runs on hardware as old as 5 years. Onset Engine is currently Windows-only; a macOS version is not yet available. Full hardware compatibility table →

Not yet. Onset Engine runs on Windows 10 and 11 only, so please don't buy it for a Mac. A version for Apple Silicon Macs is planned. Leave your email and we'll send you one email when it's ready.

Only to set up and to keep your license valid. Onset Engine goes online to activate your license, to download its AI model once the first time you add footage, and for a lightweight license check at most once a day while you're online. Checking for updates happens only when you click it. Everything else runs offline - all AI processing, rendering, and library management happen on your local machine. We never track your usage, never upload your media, and never send telemetry data. Once set up, the software is fully functional in air-gapped environments, making it suitable for restricted networks and privacy-conscious workflows.

About 4x, and it saves disk space too, on every batch of footage you add. When Onset Engine indexes your library it either cuts a separate video file for each clip it finds, or records where that clip lives inside your original footage. Core and Studio do the latter by default. On a measured 60-second 4K source that is 30 seconds instead of 1 minute 51 - roughly 4x - and 0 bytes written instead of 144 MB. Scaled to an hour of 4K footage, that is about half an hour of indexing instead of nearly two, and around 8 GB of your drive left alone. It also produces better edits: a physically cut clip cannot be read past its own end, so when the music calls for a longer shot the editor has nothing left to hold, while a pointer can always read further into the source. The Demo tier cuts physical clips.

Yes. Contact us after purchasing Core, and you'll pay only the difference between your Core purchase price and the Studio price to unlock all Studio features - 4K/60 FPS rendering, timeline export to Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, native vertical (9:16) videos and Teasers, Highlights export mode, Triptych Mode (3 vertical panels side by side), and DJ Session-to-Video export. We'll send you a discount code via email - no hassle, no repurchasing.

Core and Studio licenses activate on 1 machine. Need a second activation for your laptop? Just email us and we'll bump your limit - takes 30 seconds, no additional charge. If you upgrade your hardware or reinstall Windows, deactivate first from the in-app License dialog (Deactivate for Transfer button), then re-activate on the new machine. The deactivation process is instant and doesn't require internet beyond the license server call. Lost access to your old machine? Contact support and we'll reset your activation remotely.