You pay $17 a month for Perplexity Pro. You use it to research something for a report at work. Perplexity’s consumer terms say you may not.
Section 5.1 limits use of the Services to “personal, non-commercial use only”. Section 5.2(e) separately bars exploiting the Services “for any commercial purpose”. Neither clause mentions plans, so paying does not lift it.
That is not what most people assume they are buying, and it is not what most comparison articles tell you. We got it wrong ourselves: an earlier version of our Perplexity entry said there was no commercial restriction on the consumer tiers. We corrected it on 13 October 2026, and the correction is noted on the entry.
Of the 48 tools in our directory, 20 permit commercial use plainly, 25 attach conditions and 3 say nothing usable either way. This article is about the conditions, because they are not all the same condition and people treat them as though they were.
Three different restrictions, routinely confused
Before the tools, the categories. They have very different consequences.
- The product forbids commercial use outright. Nothing you do with it at work is covered, paid plan or not.
- The free tier is not licensed, the paid tier is. Upgrading fixes it going forward. It may not fix what you already made.
- Use is limited to “internal business purposes”. Using it for your own employer is squarely permitted. Using it to deliver work to clients is not.
Only the first is a flat no. The third catches agencies and freelancers rather than employees, and we covered that case separately in running AI tools for clients.
The one that says personal use only
Perplexity is the only tool in our directory whose consumer terms restrict commercial use as a blanket matter rather than as a free-tier condition.
There is genuine tension inside the document. Section 8.1.2 refers to users using their own Output “for their own internal business purposes”, which reads against the non-commercial clause. We are not going to resolve that contradiction, and neither should you from a blog post — but the explicit non-commercial clause is the one to plan around, and Perplexity sells a separate Enterprise product under separate terms.
Two other clauses are worth knowing. On ownership, Perplexity “does not claim any ownership in Your Content” — meaning your inputs — but the terms stop short of saying you own the Output. Section 6.4.1 states that Perplexity and its licensors “own and will continue to own the Services and any and all other software or technology that was used to generate any Output”. And if you publish output, Section 1.1.2 requires that you not do so “without clearly citing the Services”.
The free tiers that are not licensed for work
ElevenLabs is explicit. The free plan “does not include a commercial license and cannot be used for any commercial purpose”, and anything published from it must credit ElevenLabs by putting “elevenlabs.io” or “11.ai” in the title.
The subtle part is timing. Content created outside a paid subscription — before you subscribed, or after you cancel — can never be used commercially. Subscribing later does not retroactively license what you already made. If you tested on the free tier and kept the output, that output stays unlicensed.
Paid plans do carry a commercial licence, with two carve-outs: Beta Services are excluded, and content generated under Beta “cannot be used for any commercial purpose or in any production environment”.
Leonardo AI has the widest gap between free and paid of anything in our directory. Paid subscribers “retain full ownership, copyright, and other intellectual property rights of images that you generate”. On the free tier the direction reverses: “Leonardo.Ai holds rights to use, reproduce, modify, and distribute any images you create”, and you receive a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to your own creations.
You can still use free-tier images commercially under that licence. You just do not own them, and Leonardo may use them too. If the output is going to a paying client, that distinction is the whole thing.
“Internal business purposes” and what it excludes
Three tools use this phrasing, and it is the most misread clause in the set. It permits your own company’s work. It does not permit delivering a service to someone else’s.
n8n runs on the Sustainable Use License, Version 1.0, which is not an open-source licence. The grant: “You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use.” Running it for your own company is squarely permitted. Running it as a paid service for clients falls outside the grant rather than being banned by a named clause, which amounts to the same thing.
LM Studio is free at work, and the old requirement to request a commercial licence was removed on 8 July 2025. The grant covers “personal and / or internal business purposes” only, and the app terms separately prohibit selling, leasing, sublicensing, transferring or modifying it, or running it for others as “service bureau use”, as an “application service provider” or as “software-as-a-service”.
One clause in LM Studio’s terms deserves singling out, because it answers a question employees actually have: if you use it as an employee within the scope of your job, your employer is treated as the customer under the licence, not you. That is unusually clear, and more vendors should say it.
Devin Desktop assigns output to you — Section 3.1 says “Cognition assigns to you all right, title, and interest in Output” — but Section 2.1 grants use “for your internal business purposes only”, and Section 2.3(iv) forbids making the service available “to anyone other than Authorized Users”.
There is a separate point on Devin Desktop worth flagging for anyone on the free tier. Section 3.3.1 permits Cognition to use Customer Data for model training unless a paid-tier customer opts out, and Customer Data is defined to include Outputs. Read plainly, the opt-out is a paid-tier right, so on the free tier your code and the code it generates can feed model training.
The fourteen that simply say yes
It is worth naming them, because the conditions above are the exception rather than the rule. Fourteen tools in our directory permit commercial use without a condition we could find: ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Aider, Zapier, Make, Node-RED, Langflow, Ollama, Runway, Notion AI, Jasper, Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai.
Runway is worth singling out for how plainly it says it: “the content you create using Runway is yours to use without any non-commercial restrictions from us”.
Two tools say nothing usable in either direction: Elicit and NotebookLM. We have marked both unclear rather than guessing, because the terms do not answer the question.
What this does and does not mean
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. What we have done is read the published terms and quote them, with the date we read them. What a court would make of any of these clauses, and how any vendor chooses to enforce them, are different questions that we cannot answer and neither can anyone writing a comparison article.
It is also worth being realistic. Nobody is auditing your Perplexity searches. The reason to care is not enforcement against an individual; it is that procurement, legal review and client contracts all ask this question, and “the terms say personal use only” is an answer you would rather find now than in a compliance review.
What to check before you rely on a tool at work
- Find the commercial-use clause, not the pricing page. They are different documents and they do not always agree.
- Check whether the restriction is tied to the tier or to the product. A free-tier limit is fixed by paying. A product-level limit is not.
- Check the timing. Work made before you subscribed may not be covered by the subscription you later bought.
- Separate “my employer” from “my client”. “Internal business purposes” answers one and refuses the other.
- If there is an enterprise tier, the terms are probably different. Perplexity’s Enterprise product sits under separate terms entirely.
What we cannot tell you
Everything above is read from each vendor’s own published terms and dated on the tool’s entry. Most were checked on 13 October 2026. Terms change, sometimes quietly, and a clause we quote today may read differently next quarter.
We also cannot tell you what any of it means for your situation. We can tell you what the documents say, where they contradict themselves, and when we have got it wrong before — which, on Perplexity, we had.