Remotion Licensing Explained: Free Use, Company License, and Commercial Projects

“Is Remotion free?” is usually the first question a developer asks before writing a single line of composition code — and the answer is more nuanced than a yes or no. Remotion is free for a large share of its users, including many commercial ones. It is also not open source in the way MIT-licensed libraries are, and there is a specific point at which a paid Company License becomes mandatory.

Getting this wrong in either direction is costly: assume you need a license when you do not, and you may never start; assume you are covered when you are not, and the gap surfaces during an acquisition audit or a client’s legal review.

This guide walks through the Remotion license as it actually works: who uses it for free, when the Company License applies, how seats and renders are counted, and what the rules mean for agencies, template marketplaces, and cloud rendering. One caveat up front: this is a developer-oriented summary, not legal advice, and license terms evolve — the authoritative source is always remotion.dev/license.

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Remotion’s Source-Available License in Plain Terms (It’s Not MIT)

Remotion is distributed under its own license, commonly called the Remotion License. The full source code is public on GitHub — you can read it, debug into it, modify it for your own use cases, and contribute improvements back. In day-to-day development it feels like any open-source framework.

But it is source-available, not open source in the OSI sense. The difference shows up in two places:

1. Usage conditions. Free use is granted to specific categories of users (covered in the next section). Everyone else needs a paid license. An MIT library has no such condition.
2. Redistribution limits. You may not copy or modify Remotion’s code for the purpose of selling, renting, licensing, or sublicensing your own derivative of Remotion. You cannot fork it and sell “Remotion Pro Plus.”

What the license does not restrict is your output and your own code. Videos, GIFs, and images you render belong to you; the compositions you write are your code, under whatever terms you choose. The license governs the framework, not what you build with it.

The model covers the packages in the Remotion monorepo — core remotion plus the official ecosystem (@remotion/renderer, @remotion/lambda, @remotion/player, @remotion/noise, and so on). One license decision covers your whole Remotion stack.

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Who Can Use Remotion for Free: Individuals and Small Teams

The free license applies to four groups:

• Individuals — solo developers, freelancers operating as individuals, hobbyists
• For-profit organizations with up to 3 employees
• Non-profit and not-for-profit organizations
• Anyone evaluating Remotion before committing to a commercial deployment

The part that surprises most people: the free tier explicitly allows commercial use. A two-person startup can build and sell a video product on Remotion without paying anything; a solo freelancer can render client videos for money. The trigger for paid licensing is organization size, not whether money changes hands.

Two details on the threshold: “up to 3 employees” counts all employees, not just the ones writing Remotion code — a ten-person company with one Remotion developer is over it. And the free license is unlimited in usage but conditional on staying eligible: when your team grows past three people, you are expected to upgrade.

So if you are an individual or a small team, everything in this composition is free to build, render, and sell:

import {
  AbsoluteFill,
  useCurrentFrame,
  useVideoConfig,
  spring,
  interpolate,
} from 'remotion';

export const LaunchTitle: React.FC<{ title: string }> = ({ title }) => {
  const frame = useCurrentFrame();
  const { fps } = useVideoConfig();

  const enter = spring({
    frame,
    fps,
    config: { mass: 0.6, stiffness: 160, damping: 14 },
  });

  const translateY = interpolate(enter, [0, 1], [50, 0]);
  const opacity = interpolate(enter, [0, 1], [0, 1], {
    extrapolateRight: 'clamp',
  });

  return (
    <AbsoluteFill
      style={{
        backgroundColor: '#0a0a0a',
        alignItems: 'center',
        justifyContent: 'center',
      }}
    >
      <h1
        style={{
          fontFamily: '-apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, sans-serif',
          fontSize: 90,
          fontWeight: 800,
          color: '#ffffff',
          transform: `translateY(${translateY}px)`,
          opacity,
        }}
      >
        {title}
      </h1>
    </AbsoluteFill>
  );
};

Nothing about this code changes when you cross the licensing threshold — the license is about who you are, not what APIs you call.

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When a Company License Is Required and How Seats Work

Once a for-profit organization has 4 or more people, a Company License is required to use Remotion. The current licensing model splits company use into two shapes that map to how teams actually use the framework:

Seat-based licensing (for creators)

A Seat covers one person who writes Remotion code themselves — including with agentic coding tools. This model fits teams where developers build videos by hand: motion design systems, internal tooling, marketing content produced through code. If three developers at a 20-person company work on Remotion compositions, that is three seats. Seats are about authorship, not playback — colleagues who merely watch the rendered videos do not need them.

Usage-based licensing (for automation)

For companies building automated systems — video editors, prompt-to-video apps, personalized video pipelines, products embedding the Remotion Player — licensing is counted in Renders. A Render is the successful, programmatically triggered generation of a video, audio file, GIF, PDF, or still image:

import { bundle } from '@remotion/bundler';
import { renderMedia, selectComposition } from '@remotion/renderer';

// Bundling and selecting a composition — not a render yet
const serveUrl = await bundle({ entryPoint: './src/index.ts' });

const composition = await selectComposition({
  serveUrl,
  id: 'LaunchTitle',
  inputProps: { title: 'Launch Week' },
});

// This call, completing successfully, is what counts as one Render
await renderMedia({
  composition,
  serveUrl,
  codec: 'h264',
  outputLocation: 'out/launch-week.mp4',
  inputProps: { title: 'Launch Week' },
});

The same counting applies to renderMediaOnLambda(), renderStill(), and CLI invocations like npx remotion render.

Just as important is what does not count: previews in Remotion Studio and in the <Player> component are not Renders. You can scrub, iterate, and let end users preview compositions in the browser all day — only the actual encoding of an output file counts.

For how the two models are packaged and priced, check remotion.dev/license; this is one area where you want the primary source rather than a blog post.

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Client Work and Agencies: Whose License Counts?

Agency and freelance work is where licensing questions get confusing, because two organizations are involved. The Remotion license resolves it with one principle:

The responsibility for purchasing a license falls on the entity that ultimately owns the IP of the Remotion project.

In a typical work-for-hire engagement where the client owns the deliverable, the client’s organization size is what matters: a solo freelancer building a Remotion pipeline that a 50-person company will own means the company needs the license, not the freelancer.

A second rule covers collaborations: when the combined headcount of the collaborating companies or teams reaches 4 or more, company licensing applies. Two 2-person studios jointly building a Remotion project are, for licensing purposes, a 4-person team.

Practical guidance for agencies:

• Settle the license question in the statement of work. Specify who owns the project IP and therefore who carries the Remotion license obligation — at contract time, not after delivery.
• If you retain ownership and license outputs to clients (you keep the pipeline, they get the videos), the obligation stays with you and scales with your own organization.
• Do not assume one client’s license covers your other clients. Each project’s IP owner is assessed separately.

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Licensing for Templates You Buy, Sell, or Redistribute

Templates sit on top of Remotion, and this is where two independent licenses stack — a distinction that affects both buyers and sellers.

A template is the author’s code, not Remotion’s. This composition depends on Remotion as a library, but every line is the author’s IP:

import { AbsoluteFill, Sequence } from 'remotion';

export type PromoTemplateProps = {
  headline: string;
  bullets: string[];
  brandColor: string;
};

export const PromoTemplate: React.FC<PromoTemplateProps> = ({
  headline,
  bullets,
  brandColor,
}) => {
  return (
    <AbsoluteFill style={{ backgroundColor: '#0a0a0a' }}>
      <Sequence durationInFrames={60}>
        <TitleScene text={headline} color={brandColor} />
      </Sequence>
      {bullets.map((bullet, i) => (
        <Sequence key={i} from={60 + i * 45} durationInFrames={45}>
          <BulletScene text={bullet} color={brandColor} />
        </Sequence>
      ))}
    </AbsoluteFill>
  );
};

The consequences of that separation:

• Selling templates is allowed. You are selling your own code that happens to use Remotion — the same as selling any React component library. The license prohibition targets selling modified versions of Remotion itself, not products built with it.
• Buying a template does not license Remotion for you. An individual buyer runs a purchased template on the free tier; a 10-person company running the same template needs its Company License — with or without the template.
• Template terms vary by vendor. Check whether a template license permits client work, resale, or inclusion in a product. (RenderComp templates ship with full editable TypeScript source intended for exactly this kind of reuse.)

One more distinction matters if you build products around templates. Letting users create and render their own personalized videos based on your template is explicitly permitted — the standard personalized-video SaaS pattern. What is not permitted is operating a general-purpose render farm that accepts arbitrary Remotion projects submitted by users. Parameterizing your own compositions: fine. Reselling Remotion rendering as an open service: not fine.

If you want to study how template authors structure their code and licenses in practice, the ecosystem’s free and open-source Remotion templates are a good place to look before buying anything.

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Cloud Rendering and Remotion Lambda Licensing

A common misconception is that cloud rendering carries a separate Remotion license. It does not. @remotion/lambda and @remotion/cloudrun fall under the same license, and your obligations are identical wherever rendering happens — your laptop, a CI runner, or a fleet of Lambda functions.

import { renderMediaOnLambda } from '@remotion/lambda/client';

const { renderId, bucketName } = await renderMediaOnLambda({
  region: 'us-east-1',
  functionName: 'remotion-render-4-0-345-mem2048mb-disk2048mb-120sec',
  serveUrl:
    'https://remotionlambda-abcdef.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sites/promo/index.html',
  composition: 'PromoTemplate',
  codec: 'h264',
  inputProps: {
    headline: 'Q3 Product Update',
    bullets: ['Faster onboarding', 'New reporting', 'API v2'],
    brandColor: '#0B84FF',
  },
});

Three things to keep straight:

1. Licensing and infrastructure costs are separate ledgers. The Remotion license is paid to Remotion; Lambda compute is billed by AWS to your own account, entirely outside the Remotion relationship.
2. A Lambda render is a Render. A successful renderMediaOnLambda() counts exactly like a successful local renderMedia(). Distributing one video across many Lambda functions still produces one output — one Render.
3. Running in your own AWS account does not change eligibility. A 4+ person company needs a Company License whether it renders on Lambda, Cloud Run, or a Mac mini in a closet.

For the actual setup — deploying functions, sites, and handling concurrency — see the Remotion Lambda cloud rendering guide.

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How Remotion Compares to Fully Open-Source Alternatives

If the source-available model is a blocker for your organization, it is worth knowing what the trade looks like on the other side.

Motion Canvas (MIT) is the closest philosophical neighbor — programmatic animation in TypeScript with no usage conditions at any company size. It uses its own component model rather than React, and its ecosystem is geared toward interactive editing rather than server-side automation at scale.

FFmpeg-based scripting (LGPL/GPL depending on build) is unlimited and battle-tested, but you are compositing with filter graphs, not components. Anything beyond cuts, overlays, and simple text becomes an exercise in string-building filter chains no one enjoys maintaining.

Proprietary SaaS APIs sit at the opposite end: no source at all, no self-hosting, template logic locked to a vendor’s editor — trade-offs covered in depth in the Remotion vs Creatomate comparison.

The honest framing: Remotion’s license is the price of a React-native programming model with maintained, production-grade cloud rendering. For individuals and small teams that price is zero. For larger companies, the question is whether writing videos as React components beats the alternatives on developer velocity — and for teams already working in TypeScript, it usually does.

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FAQ: The Questions Developers Actually Ask Before Committing

Q: Can I use Remotion commercially for free?

Yes, if you are an individual, a for-profit organization with up to 3 employees, or a non-profit. Company size, not commercial intent, is the trigger for paid licensing.

Q: Does the 3-employee limit count only developers?

No. It counts all employees. One Remotion developer inside a 10-person company means the company is over the threshold.

Q: We are a large company just evaluating Remotion. Do we need a license for a proof of concept?

Evaluation is free. The license expects you to upgrade when you move from evaluating to deploying commercially. Build the POC first; buy when you commit.

Q: Do videos I render carry any Remotion license obligations?

No. Rendered output is yours without restriction — no watermarks, no attribution, no royalties. The license governs the framework, not the media it produces.

Q: My company has a license. Do our freelance contractors need their own?

The obligation follows the entity that owns the project IP — typically your company in a contractor arrangement. Collaborations are assessed on combined headcount: 4 or more people across companies falls under company licensing.

Q: Does embedding the Remotion <Player> in our web app count as rendering?

No. Player and Studio previews are explicitly not Renders — only the successful generation of an output file counts. A company of 4+ people still needs a Company License to use Remotion at all, including the Player, but preview playback does not consume renders.

Q: What happens when my 3-person startup hires a fourth person?

You are expected to upgrade at that point. Nothing breaks technically — there is no license key gating the npm package — but continuing on the free tier past the threshold is a compliance gap, and one that due-diligence processes do find.

Q: Can I sell templates or a product built with Remotion?

Yes. Your compositions are your code, and selling them — as templates, as a SaaS, as client deliverables — is permitted. What you cannot sell is a modified version of Remotion itself, or a service that renders arbitrary user-submitted Remotion projects.

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Summary

• Remotion is source-available, not MIT: full public source, with usage conditions.
• Free: individuals, for-profit teams of up to 3 employees (all employees counted), non-profits, and evaluation — commercial use included.
• Company License at 4+ people, structured as Seats (people who write Remotion code) or Renders (successful programmatic output generation; previews never count).
• Client work: the obligation follows whoever owns the project IP; combined headcounts of 4+ across collaborators trigger company licensing.
• Templates: your code is yours to sell; buying a template never substitutes for Remotion licensing; personalized-video products on your own templates are allowed, generic render farms are not.
• Cloud rendering changes nothing: same license, same counting, infrastructure billed separately by your cloud provider.

Verify current terms at remotion.dev/license before you commit — this article summarizes the model, but the license text is the contract.

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Skip the Blank Canvas with RenderComp

Once the licensing question is settled, the next bottleneck is build time. RenderComp offers a catalog of production-ready Remotion templates — intros, lower thirds, data visualizations, social formats, and more — each shipping as full editable TypeScript source with typed prop interfaces, ready to drop into your licensed (or free-tier) Remotion project.

Browse the collection at rendercomp.com and start rendering on day one.