Plans and pricing

How the plans work, what a credit buys, when pay-as-you-go is the right shape, and what founding-member pricing covers. The live numbers (current prices, current credit allowances) are on the pricing page; this docs page is the explainer for how the model works.

The basic shape

CueTheScene is subscription-with-credits.

Your plan gives you a monthly credit allowance plus the rate-limit and concurrency thresholds appropriate to that plan. Credits are spent per job. When you hit zero, pay-as-you-go (if you've enabled it) carries you through until the next monthly refresh.

Credits are not a billing artefact, they map to real costs. The pipeline pays per-job for Claude, ElevenLabs, Shotstack, Gemini, and the paid footage sources. The credit price reflects that cost plus the platform margin.

What a credit buys

Credits are a small unit. A long-form video costs hundreds of them, the unit is sized so the dashboard's cost preview and your spend tracking work in round numbers rather than fractions.

The pricing formula for Documentary and Listicle is 100 credits of setup plus 50 credits per target minute, at any length from 3 to 60 minutes. Some worked examples:

• 8-minute video: 500 credits.
• 12-minute video: 700 credits.
• 20-minute video: 1,100 credits.
• 30-minute video: 1,600 credits.
• 45-minute video: 2,350 credits.
• 60-minute video: 3,100 credits.

Your own script or voiceover costs less, because we skip that work. With your own script, the setup is 50 credits, not 100. With your own voiceover, each minute is 40 credits, not 50. A 12-minute video is 650 credits with your own script, 580 with your own voiceover, and 530 with both.

Shorts are not on the auto path at launch. They are coming as part of the dedicated Shorts pipeline, and pricing will be published when that ships.

The brief form surfaces a live cost preview before you submit, so the credit hit is visible before the pipeline starts. The dashboard top rail shows your live balance.

Plans

Four plans today. Live prices and credit allowances are on the pricing page; the shape:

Starter. Solo creator, light usage, four polished videos a month at the headline 12-minute Pro rate. Single render at a time, single seat. The lightest commitment.

Creator. Active channel, twelve videos a month, two renders running in parallel so you stop waiting in line. Single seat. The workhorse plan for a serious creator.

Pro. Daily-upload-capable channels, thirty-plus videos a month, three renders in parallel, three team seats. The plan most full-time long-form operators land on.

Scale. Multi-channel operations, agencies, the maximum allowance, five renders firing at once, ten team seats. Includes a founder onboarding call.

You can upgrade or downgrade between plans at any time; the change applies at the next monthly billing cycle. Founding-member discounts (see below) carry across plan changes, so a slot-47 holder who started on Creator and moves to Pro keeps the 30 percent off on the new plan.

Pay-as-you-go

Auto-PAYG is the overage path. When you burn your monthly allocation and have auto-PAYG enabled, the next jobs auto-bill at the metered rate of £0.024 per credit (so a 12-minute video on PAYG costs about £17). The monthly cap stops a runaway, the default is £200 per month and you can raise, lower, or disable it from Settings → Billing.

The cap nudge surfaces on the dashboard once month-to-date PAYG spend crosses 80 percent of the cap. A single, polite "you're approaching your cap" banner, not a wall of warnings. You can raise the cap (one-click step is £100), lower it, or switch auto-PAYG off entirely.

If auto-PAYG is OFF and you hit zero credits, the brief form refuses new submissions and points you at top-up. Top-ups are one-time credit packs at the same £0.024 effective rate (the 500-pack for £12, 2,000 for £39, 10,000 for £149).

Refunds

The refund policy is on the terms of service page. The short version:

• Failed renders (the pipeline errors before producing an MP4) refund automatically. You don't need to ask.
• Renders you didn't like (the pipeline produced an MP4 you'd rather not publish) are a case-by-case email. Drop the job ID and a sentence on what didn't work to hello@cuethescene.com within seven days.
• Unused credits on a cancelled subscription don't refund automatically but can be argued for in cases of unused full months, same email path.

Founding-member pricing

The first 100 customers get 30% off every plan with code FOUNDING. Checkout adds the code for you. You keep 30% off for as long as your subscription stays active. Slots go in the order people pay, and your slot number stays yours, even if you cancel. The pricing page shows how many slots are left. When all 100 are taken, the offer closes, and there will not be a second round.

Billing, receipts and invoices

CueTheScene is operated by Carl Brindle, an independent UK developer trading as CueTheScene.

Payments run through our merchant of record, Polar. Polar takes the payment, works out any tax, and issues the receipt and the invoice for every order. You can download them any time from your billing portal, which you reach from Settings → Billing → Manage billing and receipts. If you need a company name, VAT number, or billing address on the invoice for your own records, add those in the portal.

VAT: CueTheScene is not currently VAT-registered (it sits under the threshold), so we do not charge VAT or issue VAT invoices ourselves. Where any sales tax applies to you, Polar adds it at checkout and shows you the total before you pay, and it appears on the receipt Polar issues. Prices on the pricing page are in GBP.

Full walkthrough: Billing and receipts.

What's next

If you're trying to budget for the next quarter, the dashboard's credits-burned-in-window chart (Settings → Billing → Usage) is the honest answer. It shows how many credits you've actually spent over the last 7 / 30 / 90 days, which is a better predictor than the per-plan allowance number.

Cheers,
Carl