Check me, do not trust me

Everything here is from Suno's own published pages. Go and read them.

The cap

From 3 September 2026:

The details, which is where the money actually is:

Re-downloading something you already downloaded is free. It does not count twice.

All the stems of one song count as one download. Take them at the same time.

Failed downloads do not count.

Unused downloads never roll over.

Streaming and sharing stay unlimited. Generate all night, listen to all of it in the browser, spend nothing.

That last line is why you will see comments saying the cap is a non-issue. Just audition in the browser. Only download the keeper. Nothing to worry about.

I said that myself for about a week.

Why "just audition in the browser" quietly stops being true

Three reasons. I have hit all three.

One. The browser is not where you find out if a song is good. You find that out in the car, on cheap earbuds, on the phone speaker while you wash up. A mix that sounds huge on a laptop falls apart on a real speaker. So you download it to check. That is one gone.

Two. Stems. The moment you want to do anything real with a track you want the parts separated. That is a download. Fine, it is one. But it means you commit before you have heard the thing properly.

Three. The free tier. Seven. For life. Download two candidates to compare them and you have spent nearly a third of everything you will ever get.

So the honest version: the cap does not punish experimenting. It punishes not being able to tell, before you commit, which take is the keeper.

And if you cannot steer the thing, you cannot tell.

There is a second bill

Ownership is separate from downloads. This catches people.

You have to be on a paid plan at the time you make the song. Making it on free and upgrading later does not hand you the rights retroactively.

Now the two things I got wrong for months

Both documented. Neither hidden. I just never looked.

One. Three boxes. I was using one.

Style of Music. Lyrics. Exclude, which lives inside Advanced Options and which I had genuinely never opened.

Go and look at your last prompt.

Everything you have ever told Suno went into box one. Box two got your words with no instructions in it. Box three has been empty since the day you made the account.

That is not a small thing to get wrong. Two thirds of the instruction set, unused.

And it explains the singer. Vocal control does not live in the style box. Suno's documentation shows the working method and it uses two boxes at once, neither of which is the one I was shouting into.

Exact words on the next page.

Two. Every artist name I typed was deleted before the model read it.

This is published policy. Suno has never allowed prompting for a specific artist. Your prompt names one, the name is stripped out, and the request is redirected to descriptive musical characteristics instead. They also kept artist names out of the training metadata on purpose.

Now think about the market for a second.

Search "500 Suno prompts". You will find pack after pack sold on artist styles.

Those products sell you words that are removed before they reach the model. You are not buying a weak prompt. You are buying a blank.

It also explains my car-advert problem. Strip the artist name out of a prompt built around an artist name, and what is left is a generic genre description. After the stripping, all forty-one of my takes were roughly the same prompt.

So the question stopped being which words to collect.

It became: which box does each kind of word go in.

That has a clean answer. Six slots, fixed order, three boxes, and a short list of rules about what each box will and will not honour.

All of it is on the next page. Plus a complete recipe you can paste into Suno tonight. No email. Nothing held back for the paid version.