Nuke Indie's licence caps a studio's revenue, not just its seat count

The picture

Foundry's own Nuke Indie product page, retrieved 16 September 2026, prices the licence at $499 a year and states eligibility requires "annual gross revenue is less than USD$100,000/year (or local equivalent)." The licence is a single-user log-in, and the page states it "cannot be used in a pipeline with other Nuke commercial or Nuke Indie licenses." By comparison, Foundry's commercial Nuke page lists Nuke at $3,839 a year, NukeX at $5,219, Nuke Studio at $6,379, and a headless Nuke Render farm licence at $462.

What the documents show

Both figures come from the same vendor, on pages retrieved the same day, which removes the cross-source verification problem seen elsewhere in this batch: there is one named price for each product, stated by Foundry itself. What the pages jointly establish is that Nuke Indie is not a discounted seat inside a larger commercial deployment; the pipeline-sharing prohibition means a studio cannot mix an Indie compositor's output pipeline with a commercial Nuke seat's project files under the licence as stated. That is a structural, not merely financial, separation between the two products.

What it is allowed to decide

Nuke sits downstream of previs as a compositing tool for postvis, the stage that runs a shot through a full compositor rather than a real-time engine, and licence terms alone do not establish what class of decision a composited image can support - that depends on what was composited and against what reference. What the sources do establish is a Provenance-relevant boundary: because Indie and commercial licences cannot share a pipeline, a studio's asset and version history cannot legitimately span both without violating the stated terms, which matters for any later audit of how a shot was built. The pages do not establish anything about Photometric or Physical authority, which depend on the compositing work itself, not the licence.

The disclosure label

A postvis deliverable produced on Nuke Indie, disclosed as of 16 September 2026, should state: composited under a revenue-capped Indie licence, ineligible once the studio's annual gross revenue exceeds $100,000, and not produced in a pipeline shared with a commercial Nuke seat. A postvis or compositing supervisor would be the plausible party asserting that disclosure.

• Has the studio's annual gross revenue been checked against the $100,000 threshold before this licence was purchased?
• Are any project files or plugins shared between an Indie seat and a commercial Nuke seat, against the stated terms?
• Does the deliverable's budget reflect Indie's $499 entry price or the commercial tier it may need to graduate to?

Framed against the commercial price ladder above it, Nuke Indie reads less as a discount and more as a separate, bounded entry point into postvis work, with its own eligibility test and its own pipeline wall.