HunyuanVideo

Our verdict

A capable open-weight video model carrying a licence most coverage ignores. It is free to download and run, and commercial use is permitted - but only inside a Territory defined as the world minus the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea. The restriction follows the output as well as the model, so a UK or EU business cannot licitly use what it generates either. Read the first line of the licence before anything else about this one.

Key features

  • Open-weight large video generation model published by Tencent
  • Weights downloadable and runnable on your own hardware
  • Model Derivatives explicitly permitted, within the licensed Territory
  • No per-second, per-credit or subscription charge of any kind
  • Full licence text published in the repository rather than linked away

Strengths

  • Open weights you can download and run yourself, with no metering and no account
  • Tencent publishes the complete licence text in the repository rather than burying it
  • Derivative models are explicitly permitted inside the Territory
  • Commercial use inside the Territory is allowed without a fee or revenue share

Limitations

  • The licence opens by stating it "DOES NOT APPLY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION, UNITED KINGDOM AND SOUTH KOREA"
  • The restriction follows the output: you "must not use, reproduce, modify, distribute, or display the Tencent Hunyuan Works, Output or results" outside the Territory
  • Above 100 million monthly active users you must request a separate licence, which Tencent "may grant to You in its sole discretion"
  • An Acceptable Use Policy is incorporated into the licence and binds your use
  • No trademark rights are granted beyond the attribution the licence itself requires

Who should skip HunyuanVideo

Anyone in the EU, the UK or South Korea, for whom the licence does not apply at all. Also any product whose audience might view the output in those territories, since the restriction follows the output rather than stopping at the model.

Pricing details

Checked on the official pricing page on . Prices change often, so confirm before you buy.

What the free plan includes

  • There is no paid tier and no fee. The binding constraint is not money but licence scope: the agreement applies only inside its defined Territory, and your hardware has to be able to run a large video model.

Worth knowing

HunyuanVideo has no price and no commercial tier, so the cost is hardware and electricity. The document to read before budgeting for it is not a pricing page but the licence, which restricts where the model and its output may be used at all. Checked 23 October 2026.

Commercial use

Allowed with conditions. This is not an open-source licence, and its conditions are unusually sharp. The Tencent Hunyuan Community License Agreement states in its opening line, in capitals, that it "DOES NOT APPLY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION, UNITED KINGDOM AND SOUTH KOREA AND IS EXPRESSLY LIMITED TO THE TERRITORY". It defines "Territory" as "the worldwide territory, excluding the territory of the European Union, United Kingdom and South Korea", and the grant is made "for the Territory only". The restriction follows the output, which is the part most coverage misses: you "must not use, reproduce, modify, distribute, or display the Tencent Hunyuan Works, Output or results of the Tencent Hunyuan Works outside the Territory", and "any such use outside the Territory is unlicensed and unauthorized under this Agreement". Inside the Territory, commercial use is otherwise permitted, subject to two further conditions: if the monthly active users of your products exceed 100 million you "must request a license from Tencent", which it "may grant to You in its sole discretion", and an Acceptable Use Policy is incorporated by reference. No trademark licence is granted. Read from LICENSE.txt in Tencent's own repository, release date 3 December 2024. Checked 23 October 2026.

Alternatives to HunyuanVideo

  • Wan

    Alibaba's open-weight video generation model under Apache-2.0, with the project stating plainly that it claims no rights over what you generate.

  • ComfyUI

    A node-based local inference engine for diffusion models, letting you wire up reproducible image and video workflows on your own GPU. GPL-3.0 licensed.

  • Runway

    Runway is a browser-based AI video creation suite for generating, transforming and editing short-form visual content from text, images and video.

  • Midjourney

    A generative image and video service driven by text prompts, used through a web app and Discord, metered in GPU time rather than per image.

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