Runway officially launched Characters on 9 March 2026, presenting it as a real-time video agent API capable of creating customised conversational avatars from a single image, without fine-tuning, with control over voice, personality, knowledge and actions. This is an important step because it moves the AI video market from simple clip generation to a more ambitious model: characters that speak, see the user’s screen, read the visual context and react live. According to the official documentation, Runway Characters can receive the webcam feed or screen share from an app, understand what appears in the session and respond in real time via API, opening up use cases ranging from training to customer support to product demos and design feedback.
For those who want to try it out, the most useful entry point is the official Runway Characters documentation, particularly the section on webcam and screen sharing, because it makes one decisive thing clear right away: this is not just a talking avatar, but a multimodal AI interface designed to interact during an active call. Runway also explains that enterprise teams can start immediately on the developer platform, while preset avatars for consumer testing are available on the web app. The message is quite clear: if before video AI was content to be exported, now it becomes a digital presence to be put inside the website, app or customer journey.
The most interesting point, however, is the price. In the API Runway documentation, credits cost $0.01 each, while standard video generation varies by model: Gen-4.5 costs 12 credits per second, Gen-4 Turbo 5 credits per second, Aleph 15 credits per second. On the subscription front, the Standard plan starts at $12 per month, while the Pro is $28 per month and includes 2,250 monthly credits. The official site does not publish, at least in the pages that have emerged, a separate and transparent price per minute of active Characters conversation, so a sensible estimate for a 1-hour per week test must be constructed conservatively using the consumer API price as a general reference for real-time video workloads.
If we take 5 credits per second, i.e. the Gen-4 Turbo level, as a conservative basis, one hour of active call is equivalent to 3,600 seconds, so 18,000 credits, or about $180. Over a four-hour month in total this would rise to about 72,000 credits, or $720. If the actual load of Characters were closer to a premium model, the real cost might be higher. If, on the other hand, Runway applied more efficient dedicated pricing for real-time avatars, the total would go down. To date, prudence dictates that Characters should not be read as a cheap toy for casual creators, but as a tool to be tested in business logic, especially for demos, sales assists, training and high-value support.
This is where the comparison with Pika Labs comes in. Pika remains strong in quick clip generation, but its pricing model is more clearly built around short videos. Its FAQ indicates, for example, that a 5-second text-to-video or image-to-video video costs 6 credits at 720p and 18 credits at 1080p, while 10 seconds costs 12 credits at 720p and 45 at 1080p. Other public summaries report Standard plans of $8 per month with 700 credits and Pro plans of $28 with 2,300 credits. In other words, if your goal is to produce short social clips or quick spots, Pika may be cheaper and more straightforward. If, on the other hand, you want a character that talks live, looks at a shared screen and interacts like a visual AI operator, Runway is playing another league.
This is the new trend worth watching: no longer just text-to-video, but agent avatars that turn a call into a product. And when the market realises that a synthetic face can sell, assist and onboard better than some human teams, then price will no longer be the news. It will be the detail that comes after the shock.2
Useful links
Runway Characters announcement: https://runwayml.com/news/introducing-runway-characters
Docs screen sharing: https://docs.dev.runwayml.com/characters/screens/
Runway API pricing: https://docs.dev.runwayml.com/guides/pricing/
Runway pricing plans: https://runwayml.com/pricing
Pika FAQ pricing: https://pika.art/faq
