Is Unity free? What the free plan really includes
Is Unity free to use?
Unity Personal is free in the strong sense: you finish the game and sell it without paying Unity. The only real limits are $200,000 in revenue plus funding over the last 12 months, and console build targets that need Pro.
Yes — Unity Personal is free, and free in the strong sense: you can finish a game on it, put it on Google Play and sell it, without paying Unity anything. There are exactly two real limits, a revenue ceiling and a short list of platforms you may not build for. Almost everything else you will read about the free version either predates September 2024 or describes a fee that no longer exists. Everything below is checked against Unity's own pricing pages as of September 2026.
Short answer: yes, and the free part is real
Unity Personal is a plan, not a trial. It does not expire after thirty days, it does not lock your project when a countdown ends, and it does not watermark your store page. The product page sells it with the line that no credit card is required, and the same page states plainly that eligible developers ship commercially with it.
The full editor. Personal is the same Unity you open in this course — the whole 3D engine, the same scenes, the same C# scripts, the same build pipeline. Pro adds tools and platforms around it, it does not add a working editor.
Every open platform you can legally publish on: Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, WebGL. You own the build and you keep the money; there is no percentage of your sales going to Unity, because the per-install charge that would have done that was cancelled in 2024.
Unlimited DevOps cloud seats. The pricing update page notes that what used to be three free seats for Personal users became unlimited, so build servers and cloud seats are no longer something you count.
Learning material: the engine itself, Unity Learn, and this course — every lesson here is written against an install you get for free, on the Personal plan.
What the free tier is not
Not source code. The engine's C++ source is tied to the paid tiers; Personal compiles your C# against a closed engine, which for game development changes nothing day to day.
Not consoles. The Personal product page states that closed platforms such as Nintendo Switch, Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox need an active Unity Pro subscription, or a Preferred Platform licence key handed out by the platform holder; spatial apps for Apple Vision Pro sit in the same paid bucket.
Not unlimited commercially. There is a revenue and funding ceiling, and it is the one rule that can actually move you to a paid plan. That is the next section.
Not a stripped demo, and not a licence you have to upgrade out of to keep your own project. If you later cross the ceiling, the answer is a subscription, not a ransom on files you already made.
The line that matters: $200,000 over twelve months
The pricing update page says the free plan is available to customers with up to $200,000 in revenue and funding, and the Personal page words the same rule as less than $200K USD of revenue and funds raised in the last 12 months. Two things hide inside that sentence, and both trip people up.
Funding counts even when revenue is zero. A grant or a round of investment puts you over the line on its own — 250,000 USD received in one year means you no longer qualify for Personal, even if the game has not sold a single copy.
It is a rolling twelve months, not a calendar year and not one good week. A studio that spikes in December and drops back in March is checking a different number each time it looks.
Above 200.000 USD you must buy Unity Pro; above 25 million USD in annual revenue and funding the same page routes you to Enterprise. The financial threshold for Pro took effect on 1 January 2025.
What crossing the line changes is your licence, not your game. Under the seat-based model you simply buy the tier you now qualify for; nothing in the pricing pages describes a game being pulled or a bill for installs already done.
The Runtime Fee was cancelled — here is the whole history
This is the single biggest source of fear in the Vietnamese search results, and almost all of it is stale. In September 2023 Unity announced a Runtime Fee: an additional charge tied to how many times a game was installed, on top of the subscription. Developers were told to expect it in 2024. Then, on 12 September 2024, Unity published a post titled Unity is Canceling the Runtime Fee, stating the cancellation was effective immediately and would not apply to any games.
What replaced it: Unity returned to the existing seat-based subscription model. You pay per person who uses the editor, not per person who plays your game.
What came with it: the revenue and funding ceiling for Personal was doubled from $100,000 to $200,000, and splash screens became optional for Unity Personal games made with Unity 6.
Why people still talk about it: the 2023 announcement caused an enormous reaction, so every answer written that autumn is on page one of search results and still explains a fee that has not existed for two years. The pricing story changed after those threads were posted — the threads did not.
Personal or Pro: the two questions that decide
Nobody needs Pro to learn Unity, and nobody needs Pro to ship a first game. The upgrade is decided by two facts about you, not by how serious your project is.
✖ Upgrade when
✓ Stay on Personal while
Seat maths is what makes crossing the ceiling feel expensive: the pricing update page lists Unity Pro at $2,310 per year per seat, prepaid yearly, and notes that Pro and Enterprise take a 5% increase starting 12 January 2026. The plans page separately shows a $210 monthly option.
So a three-person studio that crosses the line is three seats, not one. That is the number to plan against, and it is also why a solo developer with a hobby project has no reason to look at Pro at all.
Feature pressure is the second question, and for a learner it almost never fires. The Pro-only items on the official pages are build targets and enterprise tooling — none of them appear in this course.
If you are not making a game — architecture, automotive, training — the free rules differ, and the plans page points to an Industry tier that begins above $1,000,000 in total assets. Read that page rather than a game-dev forum if this is your case.
Students and self-learners
For learning, Unity is free in more than one way, and the route depends on whether you are enrolled somewhere.
Unity Personal: free, no credit card, and enough for everything in this course. This is what every lesson here assumes you are running. Self-learners, career changers and people who are simply curious use this.
The Unity Student plan is free as well, and is a different thing: the student page describes it for students aged 16 and over enrolled in an accredited educational institution, gives you the Pro editor rather than the Personal one, renews once a year while your enrolment is verified, and allows you to commercialise projects under the Unity Editor Terms and Conditions. It is licensed to you on your own machine, not for shared lab installs.
If your school has an Education Grant License, that licence comes from the institution, not from you — ask your department before you apply for anything. It is the reason some students see Pro tooling in a lab and Personal at home.
The honest line: you do not need a paid plan to finish this course, and you do not need one to publish a first game. The paid tier becomes relevant when a company has revenue or a console target, which is a different problem than learning to move a character.
What actually costs money when you make a game
Ask the question the other way and the pricing picture gets much clearer. Here is the honest bill for a first shipped game, engine licence included.
Art. Either you make it, or you buy it: packs on the Asset Store run from free to a few hundred dollars, and a commissioned 3D character costs real money. For a first game the free tier plus a couple of low-cost packs is enough, and the Asset Store's free section is where most student projects start.
Audio. Music and sound effects are the cheapest thing people skip and the most noticeable when missing. A small licence or a commissioned set costs less than a month of a Pro seat.
The stores. Google Play and the App Store each take a percentage of what you sell — commonly 15% for small developers under roughly a million dollars a year and 30% above that, with registration fees that are small next to everything else. Both publish their own fee pages; read those rather than a game engine forum, because store terms change more often than engine prices do.
A device to test on. Your own phone is usually enough for Android. iOS is the one with a hardware entry fee: building and submitting needs a Mac, which for many Vietnamese developers is the single largest line in this list.
Marketing, and the cost of your own time. Trailer, localisation, a Steam page, the months of building — these dwarf any engine subscription, and they are the reason a free engine is genuinely free to a beginner rather than a trap.
The conditions that come with the free licence
The old condition everyone remembers is the Made with Unity splash screen, and it has been softened. The pricing update page states it in five words — splash screen optional with Unity 6 — which follows the September 2024 commitment that splash screens become optional for Unity Personal games made with Unity 6.
- 1
Open and find the splash image section. Untick the Unity logo and you can drop in your own, or leave the splash off entirely.
- 2
This is a per-project setting, so it lives in the project files: set it once per game rather than expecting it to follow you into the next project.
- 3
Projects built with a Unity version before 6 still show the logo by default, and the store listing is yours either way — Unity is not putting your name on the page for you.
// Editor scripts go inside a folder named Editor, or Unity will try to
// compile them into the build and fail.
using UnityEditor;
using UnityEngine;
public static class SplashSetup
{
[MenuItem("Tools/Use my own splash")]
static void UseOwnSplash()
{
// Unity 6 Personal: the Made with Unity logo is optional.
PlayerSettings.SplashScreen.showUnityLogo = false;
PlayerSettings.SplashScreen.show = true; // your own logo instead
PlayerSettings.SplashScreen.backgroundColor = new Color(0.07f, 0.07f, 0.09f);
}
}Beyond the splash, the conditions of the free plan are unglamorous: stay under the revenue and funding ceiling, keep your licence valid for the number of people using it, and do not build console targets with a Personal licence. That is the list.
If a page and a forum disagree, the page wins. Engine pricing has changed three times in the last few years, and the record of each change is exactly what those official pages are sitting on right now.
Where you stand — run these five checks
- ✓Open the pricing pages, today: unity.com/products/pricing-updates and the Unity Personal page. Ignore any answer, including one you like, that you cannot date.
- ✓Write down your revenue plus funding for the last twelve months, honestly. Under $200,000 is Unity Personal; the rest is a conversation about seats.
- ✓List the platforms you actually intend to ship to in the next year. If none of them are consoles or Vision Pro, nothing about your plan is decided by money.
- ✓If you are enrolled somewhere, check the Student plan and ask your department about an Education Grant before paying for anything.
- ✓Install Unity through Unity Hub and build something. The licence question only gets easier from real experience; it never gets easier from reading forum threads.
So: install it, and stop paying for a licence you do not owe yet. If Unity Hub is already open, the next thing worth reading is getting your first build onto a phone.
the lesson that builds this
The Unity editor in 5 windows
This post is a standalone recipe. In the course, the same thing is built as part of the one project that runs through all five tabs — Basics, lesson 05.