The free tiers that already grant commercial use
Not every free tier withholds permission. On four rows the licence reaches the free plan and what the paid plans sell is privacy, capacity or a clean file, which inverts the bargain a reader expects to find. As of 2026-09-12.
| Vendor | What the free tier grants | What it charges instead |
|---|---|---|
| Leonardo.Ai | Commercial usage of your own generations | Visibility: concepts stay publicly viewable |
| Higgsfield | The rights the terms give every user | A clean file: watermark-free downloads are paid |
| HeyGen | A grant worded for videos, not for plans | A clean file: the mark goes at the paid tier |
| Adobe Firefly | The same claim as every other plan | Capacity: daily generative limits |
Inclusion rule. Vendors whose free plan is inside a commercial-use statement on the pages read, with the item withheld instead recorded from the same page. Order. By what is held back: an asset first, then a clean file, then capacity.
1A licence given away, and something else priced
The usual design gives away capability and keeps permission. These rows do the reverse, which is coherent commercially and unusual enough to catch a reader who scans the free tier column looking for exclusions.
Neither is giving anything away for nothing. What differs is which asset is withheld, and on one of these rows the withheld asset does not appear in any licence column at all.
2Visibility is a commercial term
Where a free user's concepts stay publicly viewable and other users may copy and remix them, the cost lands on a campaign rather than on an invoice. It does not affect whether a clip may run; it affects whether the look stays distinctive.
For a launch that depends on a recognisable style that is a material fact about the asset. For internal work it is close to irrelevant, which is why the same tier is correct for one team and wrong for another.
3Capacity is the honest kind of limit
Daily generative limits are a ceiling on how much can be made, not on what may be done with it. Where a claim about commercial use is asserted of the models rather than of a plan, the free tier inherits it by construction.
A reader looking for the licence boundary on such a row will not find it among the plan figures, because the figures are describing throughput and the sentence is describing provenance.
- Free tierA free user can download their own generations for commercial usagecommercial use granted
- What the free tier costs insteadA free user's design concepts are publicly viewable for other Leonardo users to copy and remixstated on the same page
- Free tierA free plan with daily generative limits is listed alongside the paid Firefly planslisted without a separate licence line
- Commercial useThere is no separate commercial licence to purchase, and commercial use rights follow from the terms of use for all usersstated for every plan including the free one
- Free tierThe pricing page lists a Free plan at $0 a month and puts watermark removal on Creator at $29 and abovewatermark rather than licence
4From the making side
Alongside the terms behind “Free and granted”, SceneMixer's guides describe the work itself this way:
Under the terms, what you generate is yours to the extent the law allows, royalty-free, commercial use included.
SceneMixer, What You Get to Keep (read 2026-10-13)
The photo is cleaned into a product shot and that object appears in every shot.
SceneMixer, An AI Ad for a Physical Product — “Will the product look like my product?” (read 2026-10-13)
5Sources
Each row quotes a plan card or a terms page, gathered on commercial use and read 2026-09-12. The test a sentence has to pass before it counts as a licence statement is set out on the reading page. Nothing here is legal advice. Nearby: Where it is filed, Consent records, At the limit.