License

The Moondream License.

A short, source-available license with one restriction. You can use Moondream in your products, fine-tune it, and run it on your own hardware. The one thing you cannot do is offer general-purpose Moondream itself as a hosted service.

The short version

Is Moondream a component of your product?Allowed

Is access to Moondream itself the product?License required

That is the whole decision. Everything below is detail.

The single restriction

In plain terms: you cannot run a hosted service that gives other people general-purpose access to Moondream inference or fine-tuning. Building domain-specific products on top of Moondream is allowed without restriction. The limit applies only when Moondream itself is the service you provide to others, whether paid or free, public or private.

Moondream License - Section 3: Hosted Model Service Limitation

You may not provide Moondream to third parties as a hosted
or managed service where that service gives users access to
general-purpose Moondream inference or fine-tuning.

A narrow, domain-specific application built on Moondream that
does not expose general-purpose model functionality is not a
hosted or managed service under this license, and is permitted.

This clause is adapted from the managed-service limitation in the Elastic License 2.0, narrowed to general-purpose hosted inference or fine-tuning. It is a well-established restriction, not new legal language. More on that below.

The full matrix

The same rule, spelled out case by case.

UseStatus

Internal or self-hosted useAllowed

Commercial applications and SaaS featuresAllowed

Fine-tuning, quantization, conversion, and redistributionAllowed

Edge devices and customer-controlled VPCsAllowed

Customer operates Moondream on leased cloud or neocloud GPUsAllowed

Domain-specific application powered by MoondreamAllowed

Narrow vertical API that does not expose general-purpose model functionalityAllowed

Provider-operated general-purpose Moondream inference APISeparate license required

Hosted general-purpose fine-tuning serviceSeparate license required

Shared API exposing a fine-tuned or quantized Moondream derivativeSeparate license required

Full license text

The complete Moondream Model License 1.0. This is the authoritative text; the summaries above are for convenience only.

Moondream Model License 1.0

Effective date: July 7, 2026

Canonical version: https://moondream.ai/licenses/model/1.0

This license applies to the Moondream model weights and related model materials that expressly reference this license.

Plain-English Summary

This summary is provided for convenience. It is not part of the license. If this summary conflicts with the license terms below, the license terms control.

You may use Moondream commercially, modify it, fine-tune it, quantize it, redistribute it, and ship it inside products and SaaS applications.

A separate commercial license is required only if you offer Moondream itself as a hosted service: general-purpose hosted inference, self-serve hosted fine-tuning, or model endpoints that you operate for others.

A simple way to think about it:

If Moondream is a component of your product, that is allowed.
If access to Moondream itself is the product, you need a commercial license.

Use case	Status
Internal use	Allowed
Self-hosted use	Allowed
Commercial products	Allowed
SaaS features powered by Moondream	Allowed
Fine-tuning	Allowed
Quantization	Allowed
Format conversion	Allowed
Redistribution	Allowed
Edge or on-device deployment	Allowed
Customer-controlled cloud or VPC deployment	Allowed
Running Moondream on leased cloud, GPU, or neocloud infrastructure	Allowed
Industry-specific or workflow-specific applications and APIs powered by Moondream	Allowed
Fine-tuning Moondream for a customer as part of professional services	Allowed
Free noncommercial demos for research or education	Allowed
General-purpose hosted Moondream inference API	Commercial license required
Per-customer Moondream endpoints provisioned and operated by a provider	Commercial license required
Self-serve hosted fine-tuning service for Moondream or derivatives	Commercial license required
Playground or marketplace endpoints that sell access to Moondream	Commercial license required

1. Acceptance

By exercising any rights granted under this License, or by downloading, accessing, copying, modifying, distributing, making available, or using the Model Materials, you accept and agree to this License. You may not use the Model Materials except in compliance with this License.

If you are agreeing to this License on behalf of a company or other organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization, and "you" includes that organization.

If you do not agree to this License, you may not use the Model Materials.

2. License Grant

Subject to the limitations and conditions in this License, Licensor grants you a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, copy, modify, prepare Derivative Models from, distribute, make available, and otherwise exploit the Model Materials and Derivative Models, including for commercial purposes.

This license includes permission to:

use the Model Materials for research, evaluation, development, internal use, and production use;
use the Model Materials in commercial products, applications, and SaaS offerings;
fine-tune, adapt, quantize, prune, convert, compress, merge, or otherwise modify the Model Materials;
create and distribute Derivative Models;
redistribute the Model Materials or Derivative Models, subject to Section 7;
deploy the Model Materials or Derivative Models on your own infrastructure, on customer-controlled infrastructure, on devices, or on owned or leased cloud, GPU, or neocloud infrastructure; and
use Model Outputs for any purpose, subject to applicable law and any rights of third parties.

3. Hosted Model Service Limitation

You may not provide a General-Purpose Hosted Model Service for the Model Materials or any Derivative Model without a separate written commercial license from Licensor.

This limitation applies whether the service is paid or free, public or private, and whether it serves one customer or many.

You may not structure, divide, market, or operate a service in order to circumvent this limitation, including by offering per-customer instances or endpoints of a hosted model service, or by splitting general-purpose access to the model across multiple task-specific offerings.

This limitation does not prohibit:

using the Model Materials or a Derivative Model as an integrated component of a product, application, workflow, or Domain-Specific Service, including a commercial product or SaaS offering;
Customer-Controlled Deployments, including deployments on rented, leased, or third-party cloud, GPU, or neocloud infrastructure; or
Noncommercial Evaluation Interfaces.

4. Permitted Examples

The following are permitted under this License:

using Moondream internally within your organization;
self-hosting Moondream for your own applications;
building and selling a product that uses Moondream as a component;
building and selling a SaaS application that uses Moondream as a backend component;
building an industry-specific or workflow-specific API or application powered by Moondream, such as manufacturing defect detection, warehouse inventory analysis, insurance document processing, retail shelf monitoring, or broadcast camera tracking, provided the offering is a Domain-Specific Service;
fine-tuning Moondream for your own use;
fine-tuning Moondream for a specific customer as part of professional or consulting services, where the resulting Derivative Model is delivered to that customer or deployed as a Customer-Controlled Deployment;
distributing a fine-tuned, quantized, converted, merged, or otherwise modified version of Moondream, provided you comply with Section 7;
deploying Moondream on devices, robots, cameras, appliances, or edge hardware;
deploying Moondream in a customer-controlled cloud account, VPC, private cluster, or on-premises environment;
using a cloud, GPU, or neocloud provider to host compute infrastructure on which you or your customer deploy and control Moondream; and
publishing a Noncommercial Evaluation Interface, such as a free research demo or community space.

5. Restricted Examples

The following require a separate written commercial license from Licensor:

offering a general-purpose hosted Moondream inference API;
offering a hosted OpenAI-compatible, Replicate-style, Hugging Face Inference-style, or similar general-purpose endpoint for Moondream;
offering a general-purpose hosted API for a fine-tuned, quantized, converted, merged, or otherwise modified Moondream derivative;
provisioning or operating dedicated or per-customer instances or endpoints of Moondream or a Derivative Model, where access to the model's capabilities is the product or service being offered, even if each instance serves a single customer;
offering a self-serve or productized hosted fine-tuning service that lets third parties create, customize, or adapt Moondream Derivative Models;
offering a playground, marketplace endpoint, or hosted model endpoint whose primary purpose is to give third parties general-purpose access to Moondream's capabilities, other than a Noncommercial Evaluation Interface; and
offering multiple task-specific hosted services that together provide general-purpose access to Moondream's capabilities.

To ask about a commercial license, contact contact@m87.ai.

6. Model Outputs

Licensor claims no ownership of Model Outputs solely because they were generated by the Model Materials or a Derivative Model.

Model Outputs are not Model Materials or Derivative Models solely because they were generated by the Model Materials or a Derivative Model.

You may use, reproduce, modify, distribute, display, perform, and commercialize Model Outputs, subject to applicable law and any rights of third parties.

This License does not grant you rights in any input data, third-party content, or other materials that you do not otherwise have rights to use.

7. Redistribution and Notices

If you distribute or make available the Model Materials or any Derivative Model, you must:

include a copy of this License;
retain all copyright, license, attribution, and other notices included with the Model Materials;
identify any material modifications you made to the Model Materials; and
ensure that each recipient receives the Model Materials, and any portion of the Model Materials embodied in a Derivative Model, subject to this License.

Each recipient of the Model Materials or a Derivative Model automatically receives a license from Licensor to the Model Materials under this License.

Unless you expressly state different license terms for your modifications, you grant each recipient of your Derivative Model a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to your modifications and other contributions embodied in that Derivative Model, under the terms of this License. Any different terms you state for your modifications must not conflict with this License and must not restrict the rights Licensor grants in the Model Materials.

You may not remove, alter, or obscure any licensing, copyright, attribution, or other legal notices included with the Model Materials.

You may apply additional terms to your own products, services, applications, or modifications, provided those terms do not conflict with this License or purport to remove the rights granted by Licensor under this License.

8. Trademarks

This License does not grant you any rights to use Licensor's names, logos, trademarks, service marks, or trade dress, including "M87 Labs" and "Moondream," except: (a) as necessary to provide the notices required by Section 7; and (b) to make truthful, non-misleading, descriptive statements about your use of the Model Materials, such as "built with Moondream" or "fine-tuned from Moondream."

You may not use "Moondream" as the primary name or brand of your own model, product, or service in a way that suggests it is an official release of Licensor, and you may not suggest that Licensor endorses your products, services, or modifications, without Licensor's prior written permission.

9. Patents

Subject to the limitations and conditions in this License, Licensor grants you a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license under any patent claims Licensor owns or controls that are necessarily infringed by your permitted use of the Model Materials.

This patent license does not cover patent claims that are infringed only because of your modifications, combinations, additions, products, services, or use of the Model Materials outside the scope of this License.

If you or your company assert a claim in any legal proceeding, or make a written threat of such a claim, alleging that the Model Materials or a Derivative Model infringe or contribute to infringement of any patent, then the patent license granted to you under this License terminates immediately. This paragraph does not apply to a claim asserted solely as a defensive counterclaim or cross-claim in response to a patent claim first brought against you or your company by Licensor.

10. Compliance With Law

You are responsible for complying with all applicable laws and regulations in connection with your use, modification, distribution, deployment, and commercialization of the Model Materials, Derivative Models, and Model Outputs.

11. Termination

If you violate this License, your rights under this License terminate automatically.

If Licensor notifies you of a violation and you cure the violation within 30 days after receiving notice, your rights under this License will be reinstated retroactively.

If you violate this License again after reinstatement, your rights under this License terminate automatically and permanently.

Termination of your rights does not terminate the licenses of other parties who received the Model Materials or a Derivative Model from you and who remain in compliance with this License.

Sections 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 survive termination. Termination does not limit any other rights or remedies available to Licensor.

12. Disclaimer of Warranty

THE MODEL MATERIALS ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE.

LICENSOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, AVAILABILITY, SECURITY, OR RELIABILITY.

YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR EVALUATING WHETHER THE MODEL MATERIALS, DERIVATIVE MODELS, AND MODEL OUTPUTS ARE SUITABLE FOR YOUR USE CASE.

13. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, LICENSOR WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, PUNITIVE, OR OTHER DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THIS LICENSE, THE MODEL MATERIALS, DERIVATIVE MODELS, OR MODEL OUTPUTS.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, LICENSOR'S TOTAL LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THIS LICENSE, THE MODEL MATERIALS, DERIVATIVE MODELS, OR MODEL OUTPUTS WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF: (A) THE AMOUNT YOU PAID LICENSOR FOR THE MODEL MATERIALS DURING THE 12 MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM AROSE, OR (B) USD $100.

THE LIMITATIONS IN THIS SECTION APPLY REGARDLESS OF THE LEGAL THEORY, WHETHER CONTRACT, TORT, NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, WARRANTY, STATUTE, OR OTHERWISE, AND EVEN IF LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

14. Severability and Reformation

If any provision of this License is held invalid or unenforceable, that provision will be reformed to the minimum extent necessary to make it valid and enforceable while giving effect to its intent, and the remaining provisions will continue in full force.

If Section 3, or the definition of General-Purpose Hosted Model Service, is held invalid or unenforceable as to you and cannot be reformed, this License terminates as to you.

15. Governing Law and Venue

This License is governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, excluding its conflict of laws rules.

The state and federal courts located in Delaware have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or relating to this License, and you consent to personal jurisdiction and venue in those courts.

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply to this License.

16. Miscellaneous

Licensor grants only the rights expressly stated in this License. All other rights are reserved.

This License does not apply to any software, documentation, datasets, APIs, services, or other materials that are distributed under separate terms. Those materials are governed by their own applicable terms.

Except as set out in a separate written agreement between you and Licensor, such as a commercial license, this License is the entire agreement between you and Licensor concerning the Model Materials.

Licensor may publish revised or new versions of this License. Each release of Model Materials is governed by the version of this License under which Licensor made that release available.

A waiver of any provision of this License must be in writing. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

17. Definitions

"Customer-Controlled Deployment" means a deployment of the Model Materials or a Derivative Model for a single customer's own use, or for use in that customer's own products and applications, where:

the customer, or a contractor acting at the customer's direction, deploys the Model Materials or Derivative Model and controls access to the deployment or to the application using the deployment; and
the deployment is not provisioned, operated, marketed, or made available by or on behalf of a provider as part of a product or service whose purpose is to provide customers with access to the capabilities of the Model Materials or a Derivative Model.

A Customer-Controlled Deployment may run on infrastructure owned, leased, or operated by a third-party cloud, GPU, hosting, or neocloud provider.

A deployment is not a Customer-Controlled Deployment merely because a single customer holds the credentials for, or is the sole user of, an instance or endpoint that a provider provisions or operates as part of a hosted model service.

"Derivative Model" means any machine learning model, checkpoint, adapter, LoRA, weight delta, quantization, merge, conversion, fine-tune, pruned version, compressed version, or other model artifact that is created by modifying, adapting, fine-tuning, training from, converting, merging with, or otherwise using the Model Materials, or that contains any portion of the Model Materials.

A model trained solely on Model Outputs is not a Derivative Model unless it otherwise contains, is initialized from, is fine-tuned from, is merged with, or incorporates any part of the Model Materials.

A product, application, service, workflow, or API that calls or uses the Model Materials or a Derivative Model without incorporating model weights or parameters is not itself a Derivative Model.

"Domain-Specific Service" means a product, application, workflow, API, or service that uses the Model Materials or a Derivative Model to deliver functionality for a particular industry, customer use case, or application-specific workflow, where the value offered to users comes from that functionality rather than from access to the underlying model.

A service is not a Domain-Specific Service if its primary purpose is to provide third parties with access to native capabilities of the Model Materials or a Derivative Model, such as open-ended captioning, visual question answering, object detection, pointing, optical character recognition, or segmentation on arbitrary user inputs, without material application-specific functionality, constraints, or workflow.

A set of related services that together provide general-purpose access to the capabilities of the Model Materials or a Derivative Model is not made up of Domain-Specific Services merely because each service is limited to a single task or capability.

"General-Purpose Hosted Model Service" means a hosted, managed, online, network-accessible, or API-accessible service, operated by you or on your behalf, that provides third parties with general-purpose access to the capabilities of the Model Materials or a Derivative Model for inference, fine-tuning, adaptation, or model customization.

A service may be a General-Purpose Hosted Model Service regardless of whether it is paid or free, public or private, or offered to one customer or many, and regardless of whether it is offered through an API, SDK, user interface, playground, batch endpoint, private endpoint, dedicated endpoint, per-customer instance, marketplace, or other network interface.

A service is not a General-Purpose Hosted Model Service solely because it uses the Model Materials or a Derivative Model as an integrated component of a product, application, workflow, or Domain-Specific Service.

"Licensor" means M87 Labs, Inc., a Delaware corporation.

"Model Materials" means the Moondream model weights, parameters, tensors, checkpoints, safetensors files, tokenizer files, configuration files, model architecture files, and other files that Licensor makes available and expressly identifies as covered by this License, including any portion of those materials.

Model Materials do not include Model Outputs.

Model Materials do not include source code, documentation, datasets, APIs, services, or other materials that are distributed under separate terms.

"Model Outputs" means content, data, predictions, embeddings, logits, scores, labels, text, captions, answers, coordinates, bounding boxes, masks, structured data, or other outputs generated by running, prompting, or otherwise using the Model Materials or a Derivative Model.

"Moondream" means the Moondream family of vision language models made available by Licensor. References in this License to using, deploying, hosting, distributing, fine-tuning, or otherwise exploiting Moondream are references to the Model Materials.

"Noncommercial Evaluation Interface" means a publicly available interface offered free of charge for demonstration, evaluation, research, or education, that: (a) is not offered as part of, or to promote or direct users to, a commercial hosted model service; (b) is not designed, marketed, or relied on for production use; and (c) does not offer paid tiers or service level commitments.

"you" means the individual or entity accepting this License.

"your company" means the legal entity, sole proprietorship, or other organization on whose behalf you are accepting this License, together with all entities that control, are controlled by, or are under common control with that organization. "Control" means ownership of more than 50% of the voting interests or the power to direct management or policies, whether by ownership, contract, or otherwise.

Questions

Because the hosting restriction follows the Elastic License 2.0, a widely used source-available license. We took its managed-service clause and narrowed it to general-purpose hosted inference or fine-tuning, rather than writing new language from scratch. Your lawyer will recognize the structure and can review a known restriction instead of novel wording.

Building a hosted Moondream service?

If access to Moondream itself is your product, we offer a separate commercial license. Tell us what you are building and we will scope it.

Read full license