LM Studio is free for use at work

Starting today, LM Studio is free to use both at home and at work. Check the updated terms for details. Our privacy policy remains unchanged, and you can read it here.

LM Studio has always been free for personal use. This is due to our fundamental belief that AI should be accessible to people on their own machines, with no reliance on an external party, and with complete privacy.

Until now, the LM Studio app terms stated that for use at a company or organization, you should get in touch with us and get separate commercial license. This requirement is now removed.

Starting today, there's no need to fill a form or contact us. You and your team can just use LM Studio at work!

We put the original terms in place very shortly after launching LM Studio back in May 2023. The purpose was to keep our options open regarding the eventual business model. See more in this Hacker News comment from 10 months ago.

Fast forward ~2 years, millions of downloads worldwide, and dozens of enterprise deployments later, a clear pattern emerged: people use LM Studio at home, and at some point see value in bringing it to their team at work. But- with the terms stating you need to get a separate commercial license, adopting LM Studio at work became a high friction thing to do. This meant that some teams were self-selecting out of using LM Studio altogether, struggling to find a balance between starting a full blown procurement process, but also not wanting to violate the app's terms of use.

This was suboptimal. A lot of experimentation and early AI explorations happen in a work setting. To be unable to use LM Studio in those situtations runs counter to what the software is meant to enable in the first place. The purpose of this change is to realign the terms with our mission of making local AI accessible, useful, and ubiquitous - both at home and at the workplace.

LM Studio is a conduit for open source models and AI software. It's meant to be the first place you go to try new models, and a place where you can do professional grade work over months and years. In addition to the app, we're also shipping the LM Studio SDK and recently the Hub. The LM Studio Hub is where you can share your LM Studio "stuff": things you create within the app or with the SDK.

Putting all these things together, companies often have a need for fine-grained control over the models (and recently MCPs) their users can run, or require access control capabilities for various artifacts (presets, configurations, etc.) shared within the team.

Later this week, we will introduce a way to create a public Hub organization for your team, and use it with LM Studio at work (or school, or anywhere) for free. For companies that require more advanced features like SSO, model / MCP gating, and private collaboration: we are offering an Enterprise plan. A growing list of Fortune 500 companies, universities, and global organizations are already using LM Studio for Enterprise. If this sounds like something you need, contact us to get started.

In line with reducing friction for using LM Studio at work, we will also be introducing a simple self-serve Teams plan later this month that enables sharing various artifacts privately within your team. Sign up to be notified when it becomes available.

The LM Studio team currently consists of 9 people (+ 2 summer interns 🦾). If you too believe that AI covers all computer use cases and then some, and you want to work on making AI accessible and useful to people on their own machines, see our careers page for open positions.