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Licensing and activation

Bright has three plans. Plans, prices and the early access list are on the Bright page; this page explains how a licence behaves once you have one.

Free

The Free tier is for non-commercial use, with renders capped at 1920 by 1080. It needs no licence key and no account. Cloud nodes work on every plan, including Free, and are metered (see below).

Indie and Studio

Indie and Studio are yearly subscriptions bought on vfx.systems. Buying one creates a licence key on your account page, in the form VFXS-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX.

  1. Open Preferences > Licence in Bright and paste the key.
  2. Bright activates this machine. An Indie licence covers two machines. A Studio licence covers as many machines as seats you bought.
  3. To move to a new computer, deactivate the old one from your account page, or from Bright, then activate the new one.

Machines that have not checked in for 60 days are freed automatically when you need the seat for another machine.

Checking in

Bright checks in with vfx.systems when it starts and about once a day while it is open and online. Each successful check renews the licence on that machine.

  • Offline grace: after a check, Bright keeps working with no connection for up to 14 days (30 days on Studio). This covers travel and locked-down networks.
  • A heads-up: after 7 days without a check, Bright tells you it needs to reach vfx.systems.
  • After the grace: the licence pauses until the machine can check in again. Your projects are not touched.

Only the licence check and your sign-in use the network for this. Your media and project files are never sent.

Renewal and expiry

A licence lasts for the period you paid for, plus a few days so a late card retry does not lock you out. Each yearly payment extends it automatically. If a subscription ends, Bright falls back to the Free tier: projects still open, with the Free limits. Renew and the same key works again.

You can renew, cancel, change the card or download receipts from Manage subscription on your account page.

Cloud credits

Cloud nodes are charged by the second of GPU time, from prepaid credits you add on the Cloud usage page of your account. Credits start at $10, last twelve months, and can top up automatically when the balance runs low. New accounts get $5 of free credit once their email is confirmed.