Reading AI tool terms before you ship

A READING GUIDE FROM PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN BURNED OR NEARLY BURNED

None of this is legal advice. It is a reading guide. Terms change without warning, so always check the live page for the tool you are using, on the day you rely on it.

What commercial use actually means

Commercial use starts earlier than most developers assume. Selling the game counts, but so does an itch page with a pay-what-you-want box, a Patreon that funds development, ad revenue on a devlog video showing the assets, and under some terms even accepting donations. If any money touches the project, read the terms as though the commercial clauses apply to you.

Check how the tool defines “commercial”. Some define it by what you do with the output. Others define it by who you are: a few image tools tie commercial rights to your company’s annual revenue, so a plan that covers a solo dev stops covering you the moment you incorporate or pass a threshold. That definition lives in the pricing page as often as the terms of service, so read both.

Free tiers are the usual trap. Many grant a personal or non-commercial licence only, and upgrading later does not always retroactively license output you generated while on the free tier. Look at the tense of the licence grant: rights to output created “while subscribed” means your old generations may sit outside the paid licence.

Output ownership

Terms usually follow one of three models. The tool assigns ownership of the output to you. The tool keeps ownership and grants you a licence, which can be broad or narrow. Or the tool gives you rights but keeps rights of its own, including the right to display or reuse your output. The third model is more common than people expect on free tiers, where generations are often public and other users can see and reuse them.

Ownership from the tool is not the same as copyright. In the US and much of Europe, purely machine-generated output may not be copyrightable at all, which means a stranger could copy your generated assets regardless of what the terms say between you and the tool. The terms decide your relationship with the tool; copyright law decides your relationship with everyone else. For the jurisdiction breakdown, see the law, straight.

For shipping, two questions matter. Is the licence broad enough to sell the game, port it, and let a publisher distribute it? And does anyone else, including other users of the tool, hold rights to the same output?

Training-data clauses

These clauses run in two directions and most people only read one. The obvious direction is your outputs: whether generated assets feed future model training. The direction that bites game developers is your inputs. Prompts, uploaded reference images, and code in an AI-assisted editor are all inputs, and uploading your own hand-drawn concept art as a style reference can grant the tool a licence to that art.

Check three things: whether training on your data is the default, whether an opt-out exists, and whether the opt-out is gated behind a paid or enterprise tier. Tools commonly exclude paid users from training while training on free-tier users by default.

You are granting them a licence at the same time they are granting you one. Read your grant to them as closely as their grant to you.

Red flags

Certain phrases should slow you down when you hit them in a terms page.

• “Royalty-free licence for non-commercial purposes” reads as permission and is a restriction.
• “Perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide licence to your content” means what you upload never fully comes back.
• “To provide and improve the service” is the standard wrapper for training on your data.
• “We may modify these terms at any time” with no notice commitment means the deal you read today is not the deal you ship under.
• “Output may not be unique” is the tool telling you other users can generate the same asset.

Two structural flags as well. Commercial conditions that live in the pricing page rather than the terms, where nobody rereads them. And indemnification clauses that make you, rather than the tool, liable if the output infringes someone’s rights.

The pre-ship checklist

Run this per tool, before the project earns anything:

1. 01

   Find the sentence that grants you rights to output. Copy it into your project notes with the date.

2. 02

   Confirm your current tier covers commercial use, and note whether "commercial" is defined by use, revenue, or entity type.

3. 03

   Check whether output generated before an upgrade is covered by the upgraded licence.

4. 04

   Search the terms for "train", "improve", and "license to us". Note the defaults and any opt-outs, and set the opt-outs.

5. 05

   Check whether your generations are public or reusable by other users.

6. 06

   Note any revenue thresholds and set a reminder to recheck the terms if the project starts earning.

7. 07

   Archive or screenshot the terms page the day you rely on it.

8. 08

   If money is involved and the answer is still unclear, pay a lawyer before shipping rather than after.

The tools directory exists for exactly this reason: entries carry verified output terms, no referral links. If a tool’s terms have shifted since an entry was checked, say so in the community and the entry gets updated.