Unreal Engine waives its seat fee by company, not project

The picture

Unreal Engine's standard licence, published as Epic Games' own End User License Agreement, requires anyone who privately develops a product for a client, or for internal use, to hold a paid Seat subscription for every person who touches the engine. Section 6 names this the 'Seat Subscriptions' requirement, and its 'Personal and indie exception' waives it entirely for as long as the licensee, 'together with any entities in your corporate group', has generated less than $1,000,000 USD in gross revenue over the trailing 12 months. The test runs on the corporate group, not the production it is billing: a three-person previs vendor working for a studio with a nine-figure budget still pays nothing until the vendor's own turnover crosses the line.

What the documents show

The agreement states the exemption covers work done 'to privately develop Products for clients or your own internal uses' - language broad enough to include previs, techvis and postvis delivered to a third party. That clause is the whole of the previs-vendor case: a company selling shots, not software, needs Seats once it stops qualifying, but the exemption never asks who the client is or what the client's budget looks like. The same document's general terms, on Epic's EULA hub page, separately note that Epic may grant a different licensee a 'custom license' superseding this agreement for specified products - the likely route for a virtual-production stage operator running an LED volume as a facility, a different buyer than a shot vendor. Neither page states what a custom license costs; the distinction is established by the carve-out itself, not a second published price.

What it is allowed to decide

A licensing threshold is a commercial and provenance fact: it decides who may use a tool without payment, not whether an image is dimensionally, optically or physically correct. This supports class 3, commercial, at most - it governs billing, not approval. It holds Provenance in that the licence terms are auditable from Epic's own published text. It does not hold Auditability over any specific shot, since the EULA says nothing about whether a given previs frame can be reproduced or versioned years later.

The disclosure label

A disclosure travelling with a shot made under this exemption would read: previs image, produced under Unreal Engine's free indie exception, company-wide gross revenue under $1,000,000 USD in the trailing 12 months, class 3 commercial at most; Provenance held for the licence terms, Auditability not established for this frame; dated 16 September 2026; asserted by the previs vendor issuing the shot.

• Does the vendor's own corporate-group revenue, not the production's budget, clear the exemption threshold?
• Is the vendor operating under the standard EULA or a separately negotiated custom license?
• Would crossing the revenue line mid-production change who is licensed to keep working on the shot?

Editorial reading: pricing structured around who is buying, rather than what is being built, favours small previs vendors over the stage operators and manufacturers sharing the same tool's customer list - worth naming before treating one licence page as the whole market.