The watermark and commercial-use question

A free image generator can hand you a perfect logo concept that you are not allowed to use, that every other user can see, and that the vendor may remix. That is three separate problems, and free tiers for images, video and music tend to have at least one of them. This note separates the three questions, lays out what the pricing pages, help centres and terms said on October 7, 2026 for the visual and audio tools reviewed on this site, and ends with a short checklist for the moment before you publish.

Three questions that get mixed up

The first question is whether the output carries a mark: a visible watermark, a vendor's branding, or a resolution cap that makes it unusable in print. The second is who can see it: whether the free tier publishes your generations to a public feed, and whether you can take them back. The third is whether you are allowed to use it commercially: a licence line in the terms, often tied to the plan and sometimes to a specific action like a download. A free tier can pass one and fail the others. Leonardo.Ai, for instance, permits commercial use on Free per its help centre, and also makes every free generation public. Suno lets you make a song with no mark and no public feed, and then forbids commercial use and withholds the file. Treat the three as separate boxes to tick.

Watermarks, branding and the resolution cap

The clearest statements are from the video and presentation tools. Descript's pricing page lists free export at 720p with a watermark; the first paid tier, Hobbyist at $24 a month or $16 billed annually, lifts export to 1080p and removes the mark. Gamma's pricing page lists Gamma branding on free output, and removing it is the headline feature of the Plus tier. Runway lists 'no watermarks' as a feature of its $15 Standard plan and does not mention a watermark for Free; this site reads that as free output being marked, with the caveat that the page does not say so in so many words.

The image tools are less explicit. Adobe Firefly's plans page and product page do not address a free watermark at all, so the honest answer is that the vendor does not publish it; what Adobe does state is that outputs carry Content Credentials indicating AI was used, which is a disclosure mark rather than a visual one, and relevant if your business needs to flag AI imagery. Ideogram uses format rather than a mark: per the FAQ, free accounts can download JPEG at original size or transparent PNG at 1K, while PNG download and upscaling need a paid plan. ElevenLabs' documentation says higher-quality audio formats are paid-only, which is the audio equivalent of a resolution cap. Suno goes furthest: the free plan has no monthly song downloads at all, so the question of a mark does not arise because the file never leaves the product.

Public by default

Two of the image generators reviewed here publish free output to a community feed, and both say so in their own documentation.

On the free plan and the legacy Basic plan, everything you generate is public.

That sentence appears in the same words on two separate pages of Ideogram's documentation, checked October 7, 2026, and the sharing page adds that unpublishing requires a plan that includes private generation. A free user cannot generate something, decide it was a mistake and hide it. The prompts travel with the images in the gallery. Plus, Pro, Team and Enterprise keep new images private until you publish them.

Leonardo's pricing page lists Creations access as Public on Free and Private on every paid plan, and its help centre says private image generation is a feature only available to paid members. Public images can be viewed and remixed by other users. The help centre goes further on rights: images not set to private grant the vendor a licence to use, copy, reproduce, adapt, modify, publish, create derivative works of, sublicense and distribute them, while paid subscribers own all rights in their outputs. So on Leonardo Free, your image is public, remixable and licensed to the vendor; on Essential at $12 a month with Private Mode, it is yours. Runway's reviewed documentation says nothing either way about visibility, and the review flags that as a question to check rather than assume. Canva and Adobe are editors rather than galleries, and their reviewed pages describe no public feed.

Commercial rights, plan by plan

ElevenLabs is the plainest: the pricing page lists no commercial license on the Free plan, and the terms restrict free users to non-commercial purposes. The Starter plan is described as everything in Free plus a commercial license, which tells you that the licence, not the quality, is the first thing you buy. Suno's pricing page lists no commercial rights on Free, and its terms say free-tier output is for personal, non-commercial use only. On paid plans, commercial exploitation is permitted only with a permitted download, metered at 20 a month on the $8 Pro plan and 60 on the $24 Premier plan. The terms also grant Suno a perpetual, irrevocable right to identify to the public that any output was generated via the service, which is not a trivial clause for a brand jingle.

Leonardo's help centre states that commercial use of generated images is permitted and that this applies to free users too, subject to the public-and-licensed condition above. Ideogram's FAQ refers the commercial question to its Terms of Service and says users bear responsibility for ensuring content complies with laws, rights and platform terms; this site has not summarised those terms and a business user has to read them. Adobe's 'commercially safe' language is a statement about training data, licensed Adobe Stock and public-domain content, and not a licence to use any output anywhere: a generated image of a recognisable trademark or a real person is still a problem. Descript and Gamma put the restriction in the mark rather than the licence; once you pay to remove the watermark or branding, the reviewed pages describe no further commercial condition, though the terms for your tier remain the document to read.

What this means for a small business

The answer depends on where the output is going, so it helps to sort your uses into three bins.

• Internal and exploratory: mood boards, concept sketches, a rough cut to show a colleague. Any free tier works, including the public ones, as long as the prompt itself is not confidential. Do not paste an unreleased product name into a public gallery.
• Published but not sold: a social post, a blog header, a presentation for a client meeting. Watermarks and branding are the problem here. Descript, Gamma and Runway all put removal on the first paid tier; Leonardo and Ideogram have no mark but have the public feed, and Suno has no file to publish.
• Sold or client-delivered: a logo, a product video, a voiceover on a monetised channel, a jingle. This is where the licence line decides. ElevenLabs and Suno require a paid plan; Suno additionally requires a permitted download per track; Leonardo requires Private Mode if you want to own the output outright; Ideogram requires reading the terms.

A fourth bin is anything containing someone else's likeness or property: a client's logo as a reference image, a colleague's face, a customer's voice. The reviews for Leonardo, Ideogram, Descript and ElevenLabs all make the same point in different words: do not upload that to a tier where the output is public or licensed, and do not clone a voice you do not have the right to use. The vendor's terms apply to free users in full.

A checklist for the moment before you publish

• Is there a visible mark, a vendor's branding, or a format and resolution cap on the free output? Check the paid tier's feature list for 'no watermarks', '1080p', 'PNG' or 'WAV'.
• Is the generation public? If so, is the prompt public with it, and can you unpublish on your plan?
• Does the vendor hold a licence over public output? Leonardo's help centre lists one; read it before uploading references.
• Does your plan include a commercial licence, and is it tied to an action, such as Suno's permitted download?
• Does the vendor reserve a right to disclose that the output was AI-generated, or attach Content Credentials that do so?
• Does the output contain a trademark, a real person or copyrighted material you uploaded? No licence from the vendor covers that.
• Did you read the terms for your tier on a date you can name? Everything above is as of October 2026.

Bottom line

For images, video and audio, the free tier's output is rarely free in the sense a business needs. Descript, Gamma and Runway mark it; Ideogram and Leonardo publish it; ElevenLabs and Suno forbid selling it; Adobe does not say whether it is marked and ties its safety claim to training data rather than to your use. None of this is hidden, and most of it is on the pricing page or one help article away. The sensible order is to decide which of the three bins the output is going into before generating anything, and to read the licence line for your tier before reading the feature list. How to read an AI free tier before you sign up covers the rest of the page, and the method page explains why these reviews quote the documents rather than describe the interface.