Descript free plan: what you can and cannot publish
Descript's free plan watermarks every export, caps video at 720p, and gives 100 AI credits once rather than monthly, so the AI tools are a demo not a tier.
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Short answer: nothing you would put on a channel. The export carries a watermark, which settles it before any other limit matters.
But the watermark is the boring reason, and it is the one every comparison page stops at. There is a second limit further down Descript’s own feature table that changes what the free plan even is, and almost nobody mentions it.
The credits do not come back
Descriptdescript.com · affiliate meters its AI features in AI credits — Underlord, Studio Sound, Green Screen, Eye Contact, generated media, avatars. Every paid tier gets a monthly allowance: 400 on Hobbyist, 800 on Creator, 1,500 on Business, refilled each month.
The free plan gets 100 credits, one-time.
That is Descript’s own wording in the comparison table, and it is the single most important fact about the plan. Spend them and the AI tools are simply gone — not throttled until the first of the month, gone, unless you pay. Which means the free plan is not a free tier with a low ceiling, in the way that Speechify AI’s 50,000 characters a month genuinely is. It is a trial with no clock on it: you can keep opening Descript forever, but the features that make it Descript run out once.
That is a legitimate way to sell software. It is just a different product from the one “Free — $0, get started for free” suggests, and worth knowing before you build a workflow on it.
The rest of the ceiling
| Free plan | First paid tier (Hobbyist) | |
|---|---|---|
| Video export | watermarked | watermark-free |
| Local export resolution | 720p | 1080p |
| Media minutes / month | 60 (1 hour) | 600 (10 hours) |
| AI credits | 100, one-time | 400 per month |
| Cloud storage | 5 GB | 100 GB |
| Max upload file size | 1 GB | 10 GB |
| Stock library search | first 5 results only | first 12 results |
| Recording session hours | 2 hours | 5 hours/month |
Three of those deserve a note.
720p is below the format’s working resolution. Even setting the watermark aside, a 720p upload in 2026 is a visible choice, and not one that helps a new channel.
60 media minutes is one hour of everything you import, not an hour of finished video — takes you discard count too. For an 8-minute video at any realistic shoot ratio, that is one or two videos a month before the meter stops you.
“First 5 search results” in the stock library is an unusual limit and easy to misread as a small library. It is not: it is the full library with the results truncated, so you are choosing from whatever five things rank first for your search term.
What the free plan is genuinely good for
Not publishing. Two other things, both real:
- Deciding whether text-based editing suits how you work. This is the actual question, and one hour of media plus 100 credits answers it honestly. Import a real recording, edit the transcript, and see whether cutting a sentence and watching the video cut changes your week. That is worth an evening and costs nothing.
- Transcription for a script or show notes. The transcript is not watermarked. If what you want is the text of something you recorded, the free plan hands it over inside the 60-minute allowance, and you never touch the export.
What it is not good for is producing a video. The watermark is not a nag; it is on the output.
The free option that does publish
Worth stating plainly, because “free video editor” and “free plan of a paid video editor” are different things and get compared as if they are not.
DaVinci Resolve’s free version handles “virtually all 8-bit video formats at up to 60fps in resolutions as high as Ultra HD 3840 x 2160” — no watermark, no export limit, no account, no tier. OBS Studio captures for nothing under the GPL. Between them, a faceless video can be made and published at zero cost, today, at 4K.
That is the comparison that matters. Descript’s free plan competes with a trial; Resolve competes with the paid tiers and mostly holds. The longer version of that argument is on its own page, and the short form is: what Descript sells is time, not the ability to publish.
What we’d do
Use the free plan exactly once, deliberately, on a real recording — then stop. If text-based editing saved you an hour, Hobbyist at $16 a month billed annually or $24 monthly is the tier to buy and the arithmetic is straightforward. If it did not, you have your answer for nothing, and Resolve was always going to publish the video anyway.
Related
- Is Descript worth it for faceless video?
- Descript pricing explained: which number you actually pay
- Can you monetize a faceless channel on a free AI voice plan? — the same free-tier trap, in voice
- Is paid screen recording software worth it?
Caveat: plan limits were read from Descript’s own pricing page and feature comparison table on 2026-09-10. Free tiers get repriced more often than paid ones — check before planning around any figure here.
Sources
- Descript pricing — the full feature comparison table, including the one-time free-plan credit allowance
- DaVinci Resolve — Blackmagic Design
- OBS Studio