Stewart Vickers AI | The company behind Facetune just made your $95 Runway bill pointless

Lightricks (yes, the Facetune company) quietly dropped LTX 2.5 22B on Hugging Face this week - a 22-billion-parameter open-source video model that runs on a single consumer GPU and makes a $95/month Runway seat look like a tax.

Show Notes

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm1V90XQORw

What you'll get out of this video:
- Who Lightricks actually is (Facetune, Videoleap, Photoleap) and why a 79-person ML team owning its own research papers matters
- The full LTX 2.5 family on Hugging Face: 22B base, slow-motion control, pixel upscaler, clean-plate, ingredients compositing - every add-on free
- The real break-even math: used RTX 3090 vs cloud RTX 4090 vs a $95/mo Runway seat, with the exact hour count $95 buys you
- The three places Runway still earns the money honestly (and the operator use cases that just moved local)
- The one license caveat to read before you put an LTX output into a paid client ad

Open huggingface.co/Lightricks yourself right now. Look at the top of the recent activity feed. That is the proof, not me telling you.

Sources:
- Lightricks org page on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/Lightricks
- LTX 2.5 22B slow-motion LoRA: https://huggingface.co/Lightricks/LTX-2.5-22b-LoRA-Slow-Motion-Control
- Runway pricing: https://runwayml.com/pricing

Chapters:
00:00 The Facetune company just shipped a 22B video model
00:24 What this video answers (LTX 2.5 vs Runway, the math, the caveat)
00:37 Lightricks: Facetune, Videoleap, Photoleap - and 79 ML researchers
01:06 LTX 2.5 22B + the add-on family on Hugging Face
01:44 The one-sentence headline for a solo operator
02:08 Subscribe + Church of SEO Jesus
02:31 Runway $95/mo vs used RTX 3090: break-even at month 17
03:24 Why most operators should rent a 4090, not buy one
04:05 What LTX 2.5 actually replaces (B-roll, opener variants, motion, clean-plate)
04:55 Where Runway still wins: instant browser, longer clips, team seats
05:44 The verification: huggingface.co/Lightricks
05:56 The license caveat before you ship client ads
06:27 The exact play this week (rent first, buy later)
06:52 Pinned comment + Church of SEO Jesus
07:18 What Lightricks published on the same page nobody is talking about

Audio edition of the Stewart Vickers AI YouTube video of the same name. Full transcript on this episode page.

What is Stewart Vickers AI?

The audio edition of the Stewart Vickers AI YouTube channel. Each episode takes one AI release - a model, a tool, a price cut - and translates it into money for business owners: what got cheaper, who got undercut, and what to do about it this week. Operator credibility over theory, specific numbers over vibes. Every episode links the original video and the free Church of SEO Jesus community where the prompts and workflows live.

The company that makes Fastune just dropped a free video Modal that runs on the gaming graphics card sitting in your kid's bedroom. 22 billion parameters. $0 a month. Runway is officially optional as of this week. If you are paying Runway $95 a month for ad b-roll, product demo clips, or social opener variants, that subscription has a shelf life measured in weeks. 5 actually is, what it replaces, the exact break-even math on buying versus renting a graphics card to run it, and the one thing Runway still does that your local setup cannot.

Lightrix. You already know them, you just did not know it was them. Fastune, Video Leap, Photo Leap, the consumer photo and video apps you used 10 years ago. What you did not know. 79 people on their machine learning team, they publish their own research papers, and they have been quietly releasing open source video models to Hugging Face for over a year. Two papers, one on HDR video, one on audio-visual control.

A real research shop hiding inside a consumer app company. 5, 22 billion parameters, plus a whole family of add-on models that plug straight into it. A slow motion control Modal, a pixel upscaler, an ingredients Modal for compositing multiple objects together. A clean plate Modal that removes objects from a shot. All free, all on Hugging Face. 5 22b is right there at the top of the Modal list published last week.

The pixel upscaler add-on has been downloaded almost 6,000 times in the first week. The slow motion control, almost 200 times before most creators have even heard the Modal exists. The headline in one sentence, solo business owner using Runway or Peeker for ad creative, product b-roll, or social opener clips, cancel it this week. Replace it with either a used graphics card you own, or a cloud card you rent for 40 to 60 cents an hour when you actually need it. You lose long clip lengths and browser convenience. You keep every other use case.

Before the math, hit subscribe. The channel covers every open source video and image Modal the day it ships. The next Runway killer finds you, not next quarter's invoice. Everything I ran is in the pinned comment. Copy, paste, run. The Church of S-E-O Jesus, my free school community, is where the playbook versions live, and where I answer when your setup breaks.

Link in the description. Money math. I ran it live before recording this. Runway Unlimited, $95 a month. A used RTX 3090, with 24 gigabytes of memory. Roughly $1,600 on the secondary market this month.

8 months. 17th month, the card has paid for itself. The card keeps working while Runway keeps billing. Full two year comparison, Runway takes $2,280 off you. The graphics card takes $1,600 one time, plus a small electricity line, $680 saved by month 24. More every year, the card sits in the machine after that.

And the graphics card is not video only. It also runs image generation, upscaling, and voice Modal inference on the same silicon. One capital expense, four items cancelled, or five if you were paying for stock b-roll on the side. But most operators should not buy a card at all. Rent one. 60 an hour on the buy the hour providers like Vast, RunPod, or Lambda.

$95 of Runway buys you 158 hours of a RTX 4090, five hours a day of pure generation time, on a card faster than the one you would have bought. You only pay when you are actually generating ad takes. Weekends off, zero. Slow month, zero. Runway bills you the same $95 whether you shot two ads or zero. Spin the machine up in 90 seconds, spin it down when the ad batch is done.

So what do you actually Mac with this? Slow motion product b-roll for a landing page hero, 10 different opener variants for a meta ad, killed down to two, kinetic motion backgrounds behind a talking head, camera moves on a still product photograph because the motion control LoRA does exactly that. The clean plate Modal removes the ugly thing behind your product without a photoshop pass. Ingredients compositing lets you drop a product into a scene without a shoot. Every small paid feature that costs you $Twenty-nine or $35 a month across three or four different created tools is one download away running on the same card, and every take is another take at zero marginal cost. Runway would charge credits for the 11th variant, LTX charges you a bit of electricity, and the 11th variant is the one that actually converts.

Where does Runway still earn the money honestly? Three places. One, you open a browser tab and you no install, no driver update, no graphics card. If your team's hourly rate is worth more than the subscription you keep paying. Two, longer coherent clips. 5 at 22 billions still lives in the five second land that most open video models occupy.

Runway will stitch you 15 seconds with a straight face. Three, an account your editor, your VA, and your ad buyer can all log into. LTX is you and one graphics card at a time. Runway is a shared login, passwords, seats, admin panel, the whole SaaS routine. Some agencies genuinely need that. If any of those three is your actual bottleneck, keep the seat and use LTX for the volume takes on the side.

co slash lightrix yourself right now, look at the Modal list. 5 22b and the is the proof, not me telling you. 5 22b is listed as other, not the standard permissive one. Before you put an output clip into a paid ad campaign for a client, read the Modal card and read the license file. Personal use, internal testing, side projects, no drama. Client facing commercial ad creative, read the Modal provider, read it once, save the PDF, done.

The play this week for a solo operator making paid ads. 5 and the motion control LoRA from the lightrix page. Keep your runway seat for one more month while you learn the pipeline. Cancel it once you have shipped two ads with the local stack, not one, two, so you know it was not a fluke. One last thing before the end screen, everything I ran on camera today sits in the pinned comment. Every URL, every Modal name, every command ready to copy and run.

And if you want the working versions of what the paid subscriptions do not want you to have, the prompt packs I use to squeeze ad ready clips out of LTX on a rented RTX 4090, the GPU rental scripts, the weekly ad tests I ship against runway and Pika, and my direct answers when your setup breaks, join the church of SEO Jesus. It is my free school community link in the description. AI power used to live inside big companies with six figure enterprise contracts. Now it lives on whoever is willing to run the smallest video Modal on the fastest consumer card. Lightrix quietly published something else on the same page that nobody is talking about coming up on the end screen right now.