Riverside Pricing 2026: Riverside FM Plans, Cost

Riverside pricing in 2026 is four published tiers plus Business: Free at $0, Pro at $24 a month billed $288 annually or $29 monthly, Grow at $34 billed $408 annually or $39 monthly, and Webinar at $79 billed $948 annually or $99 monthly. Recording hours are unlimited on every paid plan; what is metered is separate track downloads, capped at 15, 20 and 25 hours a month. A second currency, AI credits, is granted once at signup and does not renew. We read the pricing page, the pricing FAQ and four billing articles in the help centre live on September 2, 2026.

Riverside is a remote recording studio first and an editor second. It records every participant locally at up to 4K, uploads the tracks progressively, then clips, streams, hosts and publishes the result. One housekeeping note before the numbers: riverside.fm now redirects to riverside.com, and the pricing page resolves to riverside.com/pricing from either address with identical plans. A lot of older coverage still uses the .fm name, so both spellings turn up the same thing.

Riverside pricing plans at a glance

Two things on that table are easy to read past. Recording hours are listed as unlimited on every paid plan, so the cap is not on how much you record. And the seat count for Pro, Grow and Webinar is 1. All three. The plan ladder buys you studios, live streaming and webinar tooling, not people.

What Riverside costs per metered hour

Riverside does not publish a unit rate, so here is the arithmetic: published price divided by published allowance.

The ladder gets more expensive per hour as you climb it. Pro is the cheapest plan per hour of the metered resource and Webinar costs 98 percent more per hour than Pro. That is not a pricing mistake, because nobody buys the Webinar plan for download hours; they buy it for registration, Q and A, polls, branded reminders and the HubSpot sync. But if you are eyeing an upgrade purely because you keep hitting the download cap, you are paying nearly double per hour for the extra ten.

This shape keeps turning up in the category and it is always worth checking yourself. Descript's ladder dips in the middle, where Creator is the cheapest tier per media hour and Business costs 56 percent more than the tier below it. Divide price by allowance before you upgrade, every time.

The annual discount reaches 20 percent on exactly one plan

Above the plan grid Riverside prints "Up to 20% off Yearly plans", and its own FAQ repeats it: "Annual billing saves you up to 20%". The three prices on the same page settle it:

• Pro: $29 monthly against $24 annually is 17.2 percent ($60 a year)
• Grow: $39 against $34 is 12.8 percent ($60 a year)
• Webinar: $99 against $79 is 20.2 percent ($240 a year)

The advertised number is available on one plan, the most expensive self-serve one. That much is the ordinary pattern for this category. The unusual part is the middle: Pro and Grow each save exactly $60 a year, so Grow's percentage is lower than Pro's for no reason other than its base price being higher. Grow annual is the worst commitment discount on the page, and a buyer reasoning in percentages would never guess that from a banner saying "up to 20%".

Compare the failure mode next door. Opus Clip advertises up to 50 percent with annual billing over a Starter plan sold monthly only, so its entry buyer cannot take the discount at all, and Higgsfield's entry card says "No difference compared to monthly" under a 30 percent off banner. Read any discount banner as a claim about one specific plan and compute the tier you actually want.

What happens if I go over my monthly separate track download hours?

You keep your content but you stop being able to pull new isolated tracks until the cycle resets or you upgrade. Riverside's FAQ puts it plainly: separate track downloads refer to downloading individual audio and video tracks per participant, the studio-quality files, and recording itself is unlimited. There is no overage charge, so the cap is a wall rather than a meter that bills you.

This is a friendlier structure than most, and it changes the real cost. If you record four hours of interviews and export a finished video from inside Riverside without ever downloading the per-participant tracks, you have used none of your 15 hours. The cap only bites when you want the raw multitrack files, which in practice means when you are handing footage to an outside editor or finishing in Premiere or Final Cut.

What are AI credits and which features use them?

AI credits power a small subset of features. Riverside's FAQ names them: AI Translation, AI B-Roll and Animated Clips. Everything most people associate with the product, including Magic Clips, Magic Audio, transcription, AI Show Notes and the AI Co-Creator, does not consume credits at all. The help centre publishes a complete rate card, updated in late August 2026:

The spread inside that table is the part worth planning around. A second of AI B-roll costs 20 credits and a second of cloned voice audio costs about 0.06, so generating a second of B-roll costs roughly 360 times what a second of voice costs, and about six times what a second of AI Twin video costs. Riverside's cheap AI features are very cheap and its one expensive feature is genuinely expensive. Nothing on the plan cards signals which is which.

Do Riverside AI credits renew every month?

No, and this is the single most important line in Riverside's billing. The pricing table describes the allowance as "2000 free credits to start" and the help centre states the rule outright: AI credits are purchased separately from your subscription and do not renew monthly. Once the grant is spent you buy more, and only account owners and admins can do that.

Run that through the rate card and the practical size of the grant becomes clear. Two thousand credits is 100 seconds of AI B-roll. One minute and forty, once, for the life of the account. And the grant does not scale with the plan: Pro at $288 a year and Webinar at $948 a year both start with the same 2,000. Only Business is different, at 12,000, which is still only ten minutes of B-roll.

That is the opposite of how the neighbours work. Descript refills 400, 800 or 1,500 AI credits every billing cycle per editor, so its credits are a budget you can plan against; Riverside's are a starter pack. The two rate cards price different work, so the counts are not interchangeable, but "renews" against "does not renew" is directly comparable and it is the difference a buyer needs. We put both billing models side by side in the Riverside vs Descript comparison.

What is a studio, and how many do you get?

A studio is the dedicated space for one show: its own recordings, podcast hosting, analytics and website. Riverside's answer is that if you run two podcasts, two YouTube channels or two clients, you want two studios so everything stays separately trackable. Pro gives you 1, Grow 2, Webinar 3 and Business unlimited.

For an agency this is the real ladder. The download-hour cap rises by five hours a rung, which is minor, but the studio count is what decides whether a second client can be kept clean. Podcast hosting follows the same line: 1 show on Pro, 2 from Grow, unlimited on Business.

Can I add more editors without upgrading my plan?

Only one, and only as a paid add-on. Riverside's FAQ says an additional editor seat is available as an add-on on Pro, Grow and Webinar, and that Business is the only plan with collaborative editing and custom roles built in. The help centre article describing what that editor can do (view and download recordings, use the editor, publish to YouTube, use AI Translation if there are credits) does not carry a price, and neither does the pricing page.

So Riverside's cost for a two-person team cannot be calculated before you sign up. That absence is the finding; we are not going to estimate a number the vendor withheld. It also means a team that needs two people editing at the same time has no self-serve option at all, because collaborative editing is gated to Business, which is quoted by sales. If you are one person this does not matter. If you are a marketing team it is the whole decision.

What does the Riverside free plan include?

Two hours of multi-track recording, capped at 720p, with a Riverside watermark on everything and 44.1 kHz audio. Single-track recording and editing are unlimited, Magic Clips is included, and video calls have no length limit. It is a real trial rather than a demo, but the watermark and the 720p ceiling mean nothing produced on it is publishable as a finished asset.

Paid plans lift all three at once: watermark removed, up to 4K on desktop, 48 kHz audio. There is also a 14-day free trial on Pro, Grow and Webinar, which is the more useful way to evaluate the parts that matter.

Can you get a refund from Riverside?

Within a short window, yes. The published policy gives a full refund on monthly Pro or Grow subscriptions cancelled within 24 hours of purchase, and on yearly Pro or Grow subscriptions cancelled within 14 days. Refunds go back to the original payment method and can take up to 14 business days through Stripe. Note that the policy names Pro and Grow only; it does not mention the Webinar plan.

AI credits are treated separately and harshly: non-refundable, non-transferable, no cash value, and unused credits are not refunded or carried forward. Subscriptions bought through the Apple App Store or Google Play are handled by those stores instead.

Which Riverside plan should you buy?

Pro at $288 a year if you record one show, work alone and finish inside Riverside. It is the cheapest tier per download hour and 15 hours a month is generous when recording itself is uncapped. Grow at $408 if you need a second studio, live streaming or the newsletter and creator website; just know it is the weakest annual discount on the page, so if you are undecided, monthly Grow costs you little to try.

Webinar at $948 only if you are running registration-based webinars, because that is the entire reason it exists: audience registration, Q and A, polls, branded email reminders, webinar analytics and the HubSpot lead sync are not available below it. Business if you need more than 100 registrants, several people editing at once, SSO, SOC 2 or Salesforce.

One workflow note that argues for the paid tiers regardless of which you pick. Riverside ships an MCP connection that lets assistants like Claude and ChatGPT search your transcripts, cut clips and publish, which is genuinely useful and also a reminder that a year of recordings turns into an archive nobody can find anything in; the same problem across a company's documents and tools is what enterprise search built for work exists to solve. Riverside's MCP is available from Grow upward, not on Pro.

Where Riverside is the wrong tool

Every meter on this page counts footage. That is the right design for a podcast, an interview series or a webinar, where the recording is the product. It is the wrong design for advertising, where the job is producing many different hooks, angles and presenters for one product and most of that footage does not exist yet. You cannot record your way to a creative test.

AdsGen works the other way round. You paste a product URL and get finished vertical UGC video ads with burned-in captions, several distinct angles and presenters per run, billed in finished ads rather than in hours of input, so cost per creative is known before you subscribe. If you also need a recording studio for interviews, keep Riverside; it is very good at the thing it is built for. Just do not expect its pricing to make sense for ad creative.