Personal License
For work that does not make money, directly or indirectly
Last updated: October 15, 2026Contents
What This Licence Is For
The Personal Licence covers work where no money changes hands. Learning, practice, a project for yourself, a college assignment. The moment something is sold, promoted or paid for, you need the Commercial Licence instead.
The one test that decides it
Ask whether the work exists to make money, directly or indirectly. A portfolio piece that advertises your services is commercial. A free app is commercial. A poster on your own wall is not. If you are unsure, ask us before you start rather than after you publish.
This licence is granted to one individual, is non-exclusive and cannot be transferred to anyone else. It begins when you download the file and continues indefinitely for the uses set out below, unless it is ended for a breach of these terms.
What You May and May Not Do
You may
- Use the file in unlimited personal, non-commercial projects
- Modify it, recolour it, and build on it for those projects
- Display it on your own computer and devices
- Print it for non-commercial display in your own home
- Use it for learning: practising design, 3D modelling or related skills
- Use it in coursework, a thesis or other academic work
- Show it in a personal portfolio that demonstrates your skills, where that portfolio does not advertise services for hire
- Post it on one personal social media account that is not monetised and does not promote a business
You may not
- Use it in any project where money is exchanged, fees are collected, or financial gain results
- Use it in client work or freelance projects, paid or unpaid
- Use it on a business account, or on any account that promotes a product, service or brand
- Use it in advertising of any kind, printed or digital
- Use it in an app, game, website or any software project, even a free one
- Sell anything that contains it, physical or digital
- Use it in print-on-demand or made-to-order products
- Share, redistribute, resell or sublicense the file, even free of charge
- Upload it to a file-sharing site, an asset marketplace or public cloud storage
- Pass it to a colleague, a team or a collaborator: each person needs their own licence
- Use a 3D model to sell printed objects or to offer a printing service
- Use it in a trademark or logo
- Use it to train a machine learning model, or include it in a training dataset
- Mint it as an NFT or put it on a blockchain
- Claim authorship of the file or register copyright in it, including in a version you modified
A portfolio is the usual mistake
Showing a piece on Behance or Dribbble to demonstrate what you can do is fine. The same piece on a site that lists your rates, or in a pitch to a prospective client, is commercial use and needs the Commercial Licence. The file did not change; what it is doing did.
Changes You Make
You may alter the file as much as you like for a permitted use. What you create stays under this licence: modifying a file does not make it yours, and it does not lift the restrictions above. A heavily edited version may still not be sold, shared or used commercially.
Where a file carries embedded copyright or licence information, leave it in place.
Ownership
Grid&Glow LLC, or the original creator where a file came from a contributing author, keeps all copyright and intellectual property in it. Buying a licence buys permission to use the file in the ways described here. It does not transfer ownership of the file, and it does not give you rights in it against anybody else.
If You Need More
Needs change, and a personal project sometimes turns into a real one. You can buy the Commercial or Extended Commercial Licence for the same file at any time, and from the moment you do, the new licence governs what you may do from then on.
An upgrade is not retroactive. It does not make a past commercial use permitted. If something has already gone out under the wrong licence, tell us rather than hoping: in practice we sort it out by selling you the right licence, which is a conversation, not a dispute.
If This Licence Is Breached
Where a file is used outside what this licence permits, the licence for that file ends and the use must stop. We may also require payment for the licence that would have covered the use, and recover costs where we have to pursue it.
We would much rather not. Nearly every case we have seen was somebody misreading the line between personal and commercial, not somebody trying it on. Write to us and it usually ends with an invoice for the right licence.
Questions
If you cannot tell which side of the line your project falls on, send us a description of it at hello@gridandglow.com and we will tell you plainly. An answer before you start costs nothing.
This licence forms part of our Terms and Conditions. Where this page and the Terms differ on a point, the Terms govern.
Questions about this?
If anything here is unclear, ask us before you buy. We would rather answer than argue later.
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