Can you use AI voice and video commercially?
On almost every tool here a paid plan grants commercial use and a free plan does not — but the mechanism differs, and that is what decides your exposure. ElevenLabs and HeyGen block it in the contract, so publishing free output commercially is a breach. Synthesia, Murf and Fliki block it in the product instead, by withholding the download or stamping a watermark. Runway and Descript do not restrict it by tier at all. And Kling runs the other way: its published user policy restricts commercial use of output for every user without written permission.
Four different gates, not one
Almost every guide to this topic assumes there is a single mechanism: free is non-commercial, paid is commercial, done. Reading the actual documents, there are four, and they fail in different ways. A contract gate makes commercial publishing a breach of agreement. A product gate simply never hands you a usable file. No gate means the terms permit it whatever you pay. And one vendor restricts everybody.
| Tool | What the terms say about commercial use | Who owns the output | How the free tier is gated |
|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | A Free User "may only use the Services for non-commercial purposes"; a Paid User "may use the Services for commercial purposes" | "you retain all rights in and to your Output" | Contract, plus attribution in the title |
| HeyGen | Free output "may not be sold, sublicensed, redistributed, monetized, or used in connection with commercial activities, advertising, client work, revenue-generating product or any other services" | Paid: "you own all rights in your User Input or User Output". Free: input only | Contract, and ownership itself |
| Synthesia | No tier-based commercial restriction found in the user terms | "as between Synthesia and Customer, the Customer Data is owned by Customer" | Product — Starter adds "Download your videos" and "Remove Synthesia logo" |
| Murf | "Commercial Rights" is a defined term meaning "any use of Murf created voices for commercial or business purposes, except as restricted by this User Agreement" | "You own the content and information that you submit to the Services" — the input | Product — no export on free (reported; the terms are silent) |
| Fliki | "Commercial rights" appears as a plan feature on Standard and Premium only | Not stated on the pricing page | Plan feature — Free "Includes Fliki watermark" |
| Runway | "the Company does not restrict your commercial use of your Outputs" | "The Company does not claim ownership of any of your Inputs or Outputs" | None in the terms — Standard lists "No watermarks" as a feature |
| Descript | No tier-based commercial restriction found | "you own all right, title, and interest in and to any Input and Output" | None in the terms |
| Kling | "without our written permission, you may not use, reproduce, distribute...the Output for any commercial purposes" | §4.4: "You own all intellectual property rights and other proprietary interests in and to the Content" | Applies to all users as written, plus mandatory Kling branding |
| Google Veo (Gemini API) | No commercial restriction; the unpaid/paid line is about data, not licence | "Google won't claim ownership over that content" | Not a licence gate — see the confidentiality section below |
The practical consequence is that "can I use the free tier commercially" has three different answers depending on which vendor you ask, and the risk of getting it wrong is not the same in each case. On Synthesia you cannot get the file, so the question is moot. On Runway the terms say yes. On HeyGen you would be publishing something you were never granted.
Owning it is not the same as being allowed to use it
This is the distinction the whole topic turns on, and Kling's user policy is the clearest demonstration of it anywhere in this field. Section 4.4 grants you "all intellectual property rights and other proprietary interests in and to the Content". Section 4.6 then states that "without our written permission, you may not use, reproduce, distribute...the Output for any commercial purposes". You own it; you may not sell what you own.
Two caveats, both honest. The clauses use different nouns — "Content" in 4.4 and "the Output" in 4.6 — and Kling does not define the relationship between them on that page, so the two may be narrower than they look side by side rather than in contradiction. And third-party pricing trackers widely report that Kling's paid tiers include commercial rights; CartSignal could not find that carve-out in the policy text, and does not publish a claim it could not locate. If you intend to sell Kling output, that written permission is the thing to obtain, not a subscription receipt. Section 4.5 separately requires the output to carry Kling branding, or a prominent indication that it was "generated by Kling AI" where branding cannot be applied.
HeyGen makes the same distinction in the opposite direction, and it is the sharpest free-tier clause found on this page. Its terms tell paid users "you own all rights in your User Input or User Output". A free user, by contrast, "own[s] all rights in your User Input but you are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to your User Output". Revocable is the word to notice: on the free plan you do not own the video, you hold a permission that HeyGen may withdraw.
Murf is worth reading carefully for a third reason. Its clause "You own the content and information that you submit to the Services" is about what you put in, not what comes out; the commercial grant is handled separately through the defined term. That grant also carries an explicit limit — Commercial Rights "are not resell rights and you cannot resell or offer to resell Murf's offerings" — and a ban on using Murf voices "for training any AI model". If your business model is reselling generated voiceover as a service rather than using it in your own work, that is the sentence to check.
And on Synthesia, "you" may be your client
Synthesia's user terms assign ownership with the phrase "as between Synthesia and Customer, the Customer Data is owned by Customer" — where the Customer is the contracting organisation, not the individual logged in. For a freelancer working on a client's seat, that points the ownership at the account holder. It is a normal enterprise drafting pattern rather than anything unusual, but it is not what a solo buyer reading "you own your videos" would picture.
The trap: upgrading does not license what you already made
If you trial a tool on its free plan, build a library, then subscribe, is that library now commercial? ElevenLabs is the only vendor checked here that answers directly, and the answer is no. Its help centre states that "Content created outside of a paid subscription (before or after) cannot be used commercially and always requires attribution when shared non-commercially", against content generated during a paid subscription, which "can be used commercially, and indefinitely".
Read the "(before or after)" carefully, because it does two things. The licence attaches to the moment of generation, not to the account: free-tier work stays non-commercial forever, and paid work stays commercial forever, including after you cancel. So an evaluation library is not an asset — budget to regenerate it — and, more reassuringly, cancelling a subscription does not strand the work you produced while paying for it.
No other vendor on this page publishes a clause resolving the question either way. That silence is not permission, and it is the single most useful thing to ask a vendor before a trial that you intend to turn into real work.
Watermarks and licences are set independently
The two get conflated constantly, and the two clearest cases here point in opposite directions.
Synthesia's pricing page lists "Download your videos" and "Remove Synthesia logo" among the things Starter adds over the free Basic tier — while both tiers carry the same 10 minutes of video a month. The paid tier is not selling capacity, it is selling distribution: the right to take the output away and to take the branding off it. That is a product gate doing work the contract does not.
ElevenLabs is the mirror image. It puts no watermark on free audio, and instead withholds the commercial licence outright while requiring that free generations published non-commercially carry "elevenlabs.io" or "11.ai" in the title — with Eleven Music output attributed by referencing "Eleven Music" when distributed. Nothing is stamped on the file; the obligation travels with it anyway.
Fliki sits between the two, using both at once: its pricing page lists "Commercial rights" as a paid-plan feature and marks the free tier "Includes Fliki watermark". Attribution is the category to watch here generally, because unlike a watermark it is not something a payment removes — at Kling it applies to output regardless of tier.
On Google Veo, the free/paid line is confidentiality
Google is the odd one out, and usefully so. The Gemini API terms place no commercial restriction on generated video at all — "Google won't claim ownership over that content" — so the licence question barely arises. What changes with payment is who reads your work.
| Gemini API tier | What the terms say happens to your prompts and outputs |
|---|---|
| Unpaid quota / Google AI Studio | "Google uses the content you submit to the Services and any generated responses to provide, improve, and develop Google products and services", and human reviewers may read and annotate them |
| Paid quota / billing enabled | "Google doesn't use your prompts...or responses to improve our products" |
So for client work under an NDA, the question on Veo is not whether you are licensed — it is whether billing is switched on. Google also applies the stricter data terms to all services, unpaid quota included, for users in the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, which means the gap described above is a gap that some readers of this page do not have.
The permissive vendors charge for it in input rights
Runway and Descript place the fewest commercial restrictions on output, and take the broadest rights over your material. Runway's terms grant it a "non-exclusive, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free" licence to use Inputs and Outputs "in connection with...training and improving its AI models". Descript's licence over User Content is "perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, fully paid, worldwide" and includes the right to "create derivative works from" it. ElevenLabs takes a licence to use your content "to provide and improve the Services".
None of that stops you selling your video, and none of it is unusual. But it is the other half of the trade, it is the half that matters if you are uploading a client's unreleased footage, and it sits in a different clause from the one everybody reads.
What this page does not establish
No lawyer reviewed this, nothing here interprets the clauses it quotes, and terms change without notice — several of these vendors also run separate enterprise or master agreements that override the self-serve ones entirely. Four specific gaps are worth naming. Speechify's terms page returned HTTP 404 on fetch today, so its position is carried from the CartSignal profile of 10 September 2026, which found its reading app and Studio sold as separate products with commercial rights attached only to the latter, rather than re-verified. Murf's export restriction on free accounts is widely reported but is not in the terms text, so it is labelled as reported. Runway's free-tier watermark is an inference from "No watermarks" appearing as a Standard feature, not a stated free-plan restriction. And VEED, Pictory and Colossyan were not checked this cycle. Separately, permission from your vendor is not the whole compliance question: if you publish synthetic media into the EU, the labelling duties fall on you regardless of what your licence says — see labelling AI video and voice under the EU AI Act.
FAQ
Can you use AI voice and video commercially on a free plan?
Usually not, but the mechanism differs. ElevenLabs and HeyGen block it in the contract, so doing it is a breach. Synthesia, Murf and Fliki block it in the product, by withholding the download or watermarking it. Runway and Descript place no tier-based commercial restriction on output in their terms. Kling restricts commercial use for every user without written permission.
Do you own the output of an AI voice or video tool?
On most of these, yes, and they say so plainly — Descript, Runway, ElevenLabs and Google all disclaim ownership of what you generate. HeyGen is the exception: paid users own the output, while a free user owns only the input and holds a "revocable license" to the output. Ownership is a separate question from permission, and Kling answers the two in different clauses.
If you upgrade to a paid plan, can you use what you made on the free plan?
On ElevenLabs, no. Its help centre states that content created outside a paid subscription "(before or after)" cannot be used commercially, so the licence attaches to the moment of generation rather than to the account — a free trial library has to be regenerated once you pay. Usefully, the same rule means paid work stays commercial after you cancel. No other vendor here resolves it either way.
Does removing the watermark mean you have commercial rights?
No. A watermark is a product feature and a commercial licence is a contract term, set independently. Synthesia sells the download and the logo removal while its user terms do not gate commercial use by tier; ElevenLabs applies no watermark but withholds the licence and requires attribution in the title. Attribution is the one that a payment does not necessarily lift.
Which AI tools let you use free-plan output commercially?
Of those checked, Runway and Descript — their terms carry no tier-based commercial restriction on output. Both take broad perpetual licences over your inputs and outputs in exchange, Runway explicitly for "training and improving its AI models", so the permissiveness is a trade rather than a free lunch.
Source links
- Official ElevenLabs terms of use (Free User non-commercial restriction, Paid User commercial permission, retention of rights in Output) — checked 16 September 2026
- Official ElevenLabs help centre on publishing generated content (attribution wording, the before-or-after clause, indefinite commercial use of paid generations)
- Official ElevenLabs pricing (Commercial License listed from Starter upward)
- Official HeyGen terms and conditions (Section 3 paid-plan ownership, Section 4 free-plan revocable licence and the list of prohibited commercial uses)
- Official Synthesia user terms of service (Customer Data ownership)
- Official Synthesia pricing (Download your videos and Remove Synthesia logo listed as Starter additions)
- Official Murf terms of service (definition of Commercial Rights, the no-resell limit, the AI-training ban, ownership of submitted content)
- Official Fliki pricing (Commercial rights on Standard and Premium, Fliki watermark on Free)
- Official Runway terms of use, Section 4.4 (no ownership claim, no commercial restriction, model-training licence)
- Official Runway pricing (No watermarks listed as a Standard feature)
- Official Descript terms of service (ownership of Input and Output, the perpetual sublicensable licence over User Content)
- Official Kling AI user policy, Sections 4.4 to 4.6 (ownership of Content, mandatory branding, commercial use only with written permission)
- Official Gemini API additional terms of service (no ownership claim, unpaid versus paid data use, the EEA, Switzerland and UK carve-out)