Cavalry

Cavalry animates by rules rather than by keyframe: shapes driven by generators, behaviours and data, so a hundred elements move together without a hundred edits. Motion designers use it for the work that would be tedious anywhere else, and it exports to the formats a video timeline expects. The company states plainly that individuals pay nothing. Coming from a keyframe tool, the model takes a while to click, and then it is hard to leave.

It is free for individuals on macOS and Windows, stated by the company on its own download page rather than implied by a free tier. That covers the full application natively on Apple silicon, Intel and Windows. There is no individual paid plan priced anywhere on the site, so the cost of using this is your time learning it. Studio and commercial arrangements are handled separately and are not published, which is the usual shape for software given away to individuals.

A motion designer doing work that repeats: title sequences with many elements, data visualisation, anything where the same move applies to fifty objects. The procedural model is what makes that fast. Somebody coming from keyframe animation with a single character to move will find the concepts unfamiliar and the payoff small, and After Effects remains the shorter route.