Stability AI Community License Update: Supporting Innovators and Small Businesses

Stability AI has updated its Community License, now free for research, non-commercial, and small commercial use (under $1M annual revenue).

This change aims to support individual creators and small businesses, allowing more freedom and fewer restrictions.

The company has addressed community concerns about the SD3 Medium model and is committed to continuous improvement and transparency. The new license encourages innovation while maintaining core open-source principles. For more details, visit Stability AI’s announcement.

Our new Community License is now free for research, non-commercial, and commercial use. You only need a paid Enterprise license if your yearly revenues exceed USD$1M and you use Stability AI models in commercial products or services. 

We are recommitting to our customers and our core open source principles:

• Artist friendly and pro creator freedom
• Research aligned 
• Transparent and clear license terms 
• Community focused and values driven open-source philosophy 
• Committed to regular communication and engagement with our users 

Community Update

At Stability AI, we’re committed to releasing high-quality Generative AI models and technology, and sharing them generously with our community of Generative AI innovators and media creators. We acknowledge that our latest release, SD3 Medium, didn’t meet our community’s high expectations. We heard you and have made improvements to address your concerns and to continue to support the open source community. 

We fixed the License

We recognize that the commercial license originally associated with SD3 caused some confusion and concern in the community so we have revised the license for individual creators and small businesses. Models released under this new “Stability AI Community License” can be used for free much more broadly than they could under the previous licenses. It covers recent Stability AI models including SD3 Medium. Here are our objectives:

• Non-commercial use remains free: People and organizations that install and run Stability AI models on their own devices (directly or through installing free open-source packages that include them) for non-commercial uses can continue doing so for free. This applies to most of our community, e.g.: researchers that usually publish their research for free, free open-source developers, full-time students, teachers, hobbyists, “fine-tuners” that improve our models and distribute them, etc.
• Free commercial use appropriate for individual use and small businesses: If you or your small business use Stability AI’s models under the “Stability AI Community License”,  create derivative products (e.g. finetunes of Stable Diffusion 3) or integrate our models within your product or service, it’s free as long as your annual revenues (regardless of whether derived from Stability’s Models or derivative products) don’t exceed USD $1M (or local currency equivalent) . 
• Fewer limits: There will be no restrictions on the number of media files (e.g.: images, video, etc.) that can be created with the Stability AI Community License Agreement. If this license applies to you, as long as you don’t use it for activities that are illegal, or  clearly violate our license or AUP, Stability AI will never ask you to delete resulting images, fine-tunes or other derived products – even if you never pay Stability AI.
• Only commercial users need to self-report: If you integrate Stability AI’s models or derived products into your own commercial products or services, and your annual revenues are below USD $1M, you don’t need to pay anything to Stability AI.  We do ask that you fill out this brief form, and indicate what models are you most interested in. Once your annual revenues exceed USD $1M (or local currency equivalent), you’ll need to contact Stability for a separate Enterprise license.

Improving Model Quality

Before we released SD3 Medium, our initial testing indicated that it was, in most cases, a much better base model compared to SDXL, in terms of prompt adherence, diversity, detail, and overall quality. However, the community quickly identified some critical quality issues mainly related to body poses and words that were too rarely seen in the training set. To address these concerns, we have focused on two key areas:

• Continuous Improvement: SD3 Medium is still a work in progress. We aim to release a much improved version in the coming weeks.
• Model usage: We are all researching how to best use this new architecture and model. As we learn more about the best ways to use the model and to fine-tune it, we will share our findings as well as those of others In the community.

Next Steps

We are updating our FAQ with additional details as we finish updating our licenses.

Thank you for your continued support. With your help, we will continue to push the frontiers of open Generative AI.

— The Stability Team