KeyShot's network rendering now sits behind a higher tier entirely

The picture

KeyShot's own pricing page, retrieved 16 September 2026 during the version 2026.1 release cycle documented in Luxion's 2026.1 release notes, lists KeyShot Professional at $1,299 a year and KeyShot Business at $1,599 a year, a $300 difference. Network Rendering, described as distributed rendering scaling from 16 to 256 cores, is priced separately at $32 a month billed annually, $384 a year. The pricing page states this add-on is "available in: Business and Enterprise," and included at no extra charge in Enterprise. Professional is not listed as eligible for the add-on at any price.

What the documents show

Two separate figures on the same page establish the structure: the $300 gap between Professional and Business is the cost of eligibility itself, before the $384 add-on is even purchased. The 2026.1 release notes, which this retrieval checked directly, document interface changes to how render modes are presented and a renamed render-queue tool, but do not themselves state a change to which tier gates Network Rendering; that gating is documented only on the current pricing page. This entry therefore reports the tier structure as it stands in the retrieved documents, not as a confirmed change from an earlier state this retrieval could not verify.

What it is allowed to decide

A licensing tier is a procurement gate, not a technical authority over an image, so no decision class attaches to Network Rendering as a feature. What the pricing page does establish is a Physical-authority-adjacent fact about production capacity: distributed rendering across up to 256 cores changes how much simulated or path-traced detail a studio can afford to compute per deliverable, without changing whether that detail is itself correct. The documents do not establish Photometric authority one way or the other; core count is a throughput question, not a light-behaviour one.

The disclosure label

A render produced using KeyShot Network Rendering, disclosed as of 16 September 2026, should note: rendered on a Business-tier or higher KeyShot subscription with the Network Rendering add-on; more compute does not by itself confirm photometric accuracy against a named fixture or sun dataset. A studio's technical director specifying render infrastructure would be the plausible party asserting that note.

• Does the studio's current KeyShot subscription tier even permit purchasing Network Rendering, before cost is considered?
• Is the $300 tier gap being budgeted separately from the $384 Network Rendering add-on itself?
• Does faster distributed rendering change anything about the underlying lighting data's accuracy?

Framed as a packaging requirement rather than a price cut, the documented change is that a studio cannot buy its way into faster rendering from Professional at any price; it must first buy a different tier.