Plans & Limits
How PanelWave plans work — the free tier, the one-time Work Pass, the Creator and Studio subscriptions, and Publisher/Enterprise agreements — and what each one is for.
PanelWave is sold two ways, because authoring a graphic novel and running a catalogue are different jobs. A Work Pass is a one-time purchase for one book. A subscription (Creator or Studio) is for people who keep publishing. Publishers get a negotiated agreement built around their titles.
This page explains what each plan is for, not what it costs. Current prices, exact limits, and allowances live on the pricing page at panelwave.org — the single place they are kept up to date.
Two ways to pay
The dividing line is simple, and every limit follows from it:
- One-time value → one-time payment. Authoring a work ends when the work ships. A Work Pass buys that: the editor, the publication slot, and a fixed bundle of exports and voice-generation minutes, used whenever you like.
- Continuing value → continuing payment. Allowances that refill every month, extra team seats, a staging environment, review workflows, and long analytics retention are things you consume for as long as you keep working. Those are subscription-only, and no Work Pass includes them.
That rule is why a Work Pass never gets a second seat and never gets a monthly allowance, no matter how many passes you stack.
Free
A real publication, not a trial. You get one complete work with enough panels for a full-length European-format graphic novel, two locales, basic monetization, and the whole editor — speech bubbles, hotspots, branching, variables, audio. Exports carry a watermark and analytics use a short retention window.
Free is where you find out whether the medium suits your story. Nothing you make on it is trapped: see Export.
Work Pass
A one-time purchase that unlocks one additional publication permanently. No subscription, no expiry, no renewal date.
- Stackable — buy one per book. Two passes, two extra publications.
- Full authoring — the complete editor with no panel cap, more locales than Free, and the full paywall for charging your readers.
- A one-time credit bundle — a fixed number of exports and voice-generation minutes that do not refill.
- Hosting inside a fair-use quota, per work.
It exists for the creator with one story to tell, who should not have to rent a tool forever to publish it once.
A pass-licensed publication stays yours permanently, and it is licensed independently of any subscription you take later: if you own three Work Passes and then subscribe to Creator, you have thirteen publications, not ten. Nothing you bought once is absorbed by a plan you buy afterwards, and a pass work never becomes read-only if you downgrade.
A Work Pass does not include: team seats, a staging environment, full review workflows, long analytics retention, or refilling monthly allowances.
Passes stack, but they do not become a subscription. Once you are publishing regularly, Creator costs less than buying pass after pass — the app tells you when you reach that point, and the arithmetic is on the pricing page.
Creator
The subscription for someone building a catalogue on their own. It adds what a pass deliberately leaves out:
- Many publications under one account instead of one per purchase.
- Allowances that refill monthly — exports and voice generation, every month, rather than once.
- Longer analytics retention, so you can see how readers move through a work over a season rather than a week.
- A production environment alongside your working one.
- A small number of team seats, with a couple more available as an add-on. Beyond that, the plan is Studio — collaboration at scale is what Studio is for.
Studio
The subscription for a team working on the same books at the same time. On top of everything Creator has:
- Team seats in the dozen-plus range, with roles and permissions.
- A staging environment as well as development and production, so work in review never touches what readers see.
- Full review workflows — the branching/approval process a team needs when more than one person can change a page.
- Long analytics retention, measured in years.
- A custom domain for your published works, and SSO/OIDC available for teams that need it.
- Priority support.
If you are more than a handful of people, the seat count is usually what decides this, not the feature list.
Publisher / Enterprise
A negotiated agreement rather than a self-serve plan, structured in two parts because publishers budget per title: an annual platform fee plus a per-title fee for each published book.
The platform side is about what a contract provides and a credit card cannot:
- Contractual SLA, negotiated data-processing terms, and support for your vendor security review.
- Deployment choice — shared cloud, private cloud, or on-premise.
- White-label publishing under your own brand rather than PanelWave's.
- Custom data retention and residency commitments.
- Procurement fit — purchase orders, annual invoicing, a custom contract.
- Dedicated onboarding and a named account manager.
Start with a single pilot title and grow with the catalogue. Contact sales for a quote.
What happens when you reach a limit
Nothing is deleted and nothing is held hostage.
- Content stays yours and stays intact. If you move to a smaller plan, anything above its limits becomes read-only until you upgrade again — see Read-only works.
- Metered usage keeps working, and you pay for what you use. Storage, bandwidth, exports and voice generation have published overage rates on the pricing page.
- Above a Work Pass's fair-use hosting quota you have three honest exits: pay the metered overage, move to a subscription, or export everything and host it yourself.
That last option is real, not a formality. The manifest format is open (CC BY 4.0) and the player is MIT-licensed, so a work you export runs anywhere you put it — see Export and the player documentation.
Read-only works
When a team has more works than its plan covers — typically after moving to a smaller plan — the works above the limit become read-only. Which ones is decided by recent activity:
- Works bought with a Work Pass never count and never go read-only.
- Archived works don't count either.
- The remaining works are ranked by when they were last edited, most recent first. As many as the plan's publication limit stay editable; the rest are read-only.
A read-only work is not lost and not hidden. You can still open it in the editor, read and preview it, open its Backstage tools, and export it — only changes are refused. The editor and the Backstage tools show a Read-only banner with the reason, turn auto-save off, and hide or disable their write actions (upload, add, edit, delete, reorder), so you don't collect a permission error on every edit (see Editor Layout).
To make it editable again: upgrade, buy a Work Pass for it, or archive a work you no longer edit to free a slot.
A team that has been suspended sees the same read-only behaviour on all of its works, with a banner saying so.
Plans are what you pay PanelWave. They are not what your readers pay you. Charging readers — paywall rules, products, price points, coupons — is a separate system, documented in Monetization. PanelWave takes no revenue share on your content sales on any plan.