Waves Online Mastering Fair Usage Policy

Last updated: Sept. 10, 2025

What is “Unlimited Use” for Waves Online Mastering Pro Subscription Service?

We offer “unlimited use” to support creative freedom — but within clearly defined limits to ensure fairness and reliability.

Here's how it works:

  1. What Does “Unlimited” Mean?

    The term “unlimited” suggests no restrictions, but in practice, most unlimited services include reasonable limits to ensure fair use and maintain quality. Our unlimited plan includes reasonable usage limits to keep the service reliable and fair for all users.

  2. What is Reasonable Use?

    Reasonable use means typical activity by individual and professional creators:

    • Mastering a few tracks each month is normal.
    • Full-time freelancers or producers creating music regularly fall within expected use.

    Unreasonable use often involves automated processing or mass servicing for third-party clients, which is outside the scope of our Online Pro Mastering Subscription Service. To maintain fairness, we set a monthly fair use limit of 240 mastered tracks per user, designed to accommodate even the busiest professionals. That’s what we define as fair and customary creative use — with no per-track charges and no artificial throttling.

    If you consistently reach or exceed this threshold, it may indicate usage that goes beyond personal or professional creative work — and into commercial-scale or abusive use, which violates our fair usage policy.

  3. Professional Use vs. Commercial Use

    We welcome professional use for individual creators, including monetized projects and client work on a project basis. However, we restrict commercial-scale use that involves mass processing or automated workflows.

    Permitted Professional Use:

    • Mastering your own monetized work
    • Delivering custom tracks to clients on a project-by-project basis

    Restricted Commercial Use:

    • Mastering content for multiple clients at scale
    • Running a workflow that automatically processes high volumes of tracks
    • Using the service for mass production or agency-style delivery

  4. What Happens if You Get Close to the Limit?

    We understand that projects can get busy. That’s why we follow a two-step process for enforcing usage limits:

    • Step 1 – Warning:

      If your usage approaches the monthly 240 fair use limit, we’ll send a notification to the email listed in your account so that you’re aware and can adjust if needed.

    • Step 2 – Violation:

      If you exceed the monthly 240 master fair use limit more than once, we may temporarily suspend your use of the service or permanently terminate your account, in our sole discretion. In either cases, you will not be eligible for any refund or credit for the remaining billing period.

  5. Why This Policy Exists

    This policy helps us maintain a fast, fair, and reliable service for everyone.

    We aim to be transparent about how our service works so you can use it confidently. This policy is here to ensure fair access and to prevent misuse — not to limit reasonable creative use.

  6. Questions? We’re Here.

    Not sure if your use case fits? Just reach out support