DVAI Bridge Licensing

Free for personal use. Commercial use on a fair, tiered model.

DVAI Bridge is source-available software from Deep Voice AI Limited. It's free to use, modify, and learn from in personal, educational, academic, and evaluation contexts. When you ship Bridge inside a product that earns revenue, we ask you to take a commercial licence.

This page is the canonical statement of how Bridge is licensed and what we charge. We publish our model openly — transparent pricing builds trust.

What is DVAI Bridge?

DVAI Bridge is a local-inference SDK for building cross-platform apps. One API, one library family, one consistent developer experience — across browser, server, desktop, and mobile. Bridge removes the framework-bridge overhead that has historically made on-device AI awkward in mobile apps, and adds distributed-inference across the devices a user already owns.

Bridge is public on GitHub. Read the source, fork it, learn from it, contribute to it — all under the terms of this licence.

The licence in one paragraph

Bridge is distributed under the DVAI Bridge Community Licence v1.0 (DVAI-BCL v1.0). The licence is source-available. Personal, educational, academic, evaluation, and internal-only use is free. Commercial use — anything in a product or service that earns revenue — needs a separate commercial licence from Deep Voice AI Limited. Each Released Version converts automatically to Apache 2.0 three years after its public release date, so the long-term direction is unambiguously open source.

The full licence text lives in the LICENSE file in the Bridge GitHub repository.

What you can do for free

Under the Community Licence, all of the following is free:

• Personal projects. Build whatever you want for yourself. Experiment. Learn. Hack on it.
• Education. Teach it. Learn from it. Use it in coursework. Build with it in academic projects.
• Academic research. Cite it. Reference it. Build research outputs on it where the results are publicly disseminated.
• Evaluate it for up to 90 days. Take it for a spin in a commercial context to see if it fits — no commitment needed.
• Internal-only use. Deploy it for internal tooling inside your organisation, where the capability isn't distributed to outside parties and doesn't earn revenue from them.
• Contribute. Submit pull requests, file issues, propose features. We welcome contributions under our Contributor Licence Agreement.

You can modify the code, redistribute it, and build derivative works freely. The conditions: keep our attribution notices, include the licence text with any redistribution, and stay within the licence terms.

When you need a commercial licence

You need a commercial licence when you're using Bridge in a way that earns revenue. Specifically:

• You're integrating Bridge into a product or service that you sell, licence, host, or make available to third parties on terms that earn revenue.
• You're providing inference or AI services to third parties using Bridge.
• Your organisation earns revenue and Bridge is part of any commercial offering — even if Bridge itself isn't directly monetised.

Unsure whether your use case is commercial? Email us and we'll talk it through. We'd rather have a conversation than have you guess.

How the commercial royalty works

We use a tiered marginal-rate royalty, modelled on Unreal Engine's published terms. Each rate applies only to revenue inside that band — you only pay the higher percentage on the portion of revenue that's in the higher band, not on total revenue.

Worked examples:

• Bridge-dependent annual revenue of £200,000 → 4% on the portion above £90,000 = 4% × £110,000 = £4,400 per year.
• £750,000 → 4% × £410,000 + 6% × £250,000 = £31,400 per year.
• £2,500,000 → 4% × £410,000 + 6% × £1,000,000 + 8% × £1,000,000 = £156,400 per year.

Why marginal rates? Because a startup at £200,000 shouldn't pay the same rate as an established company at £5 million. Marginal rates scale smoothly with growth — no punishing thresholds.

What counts as "Bridge-dependent revenue"?

Royalty is calculated on revenue attributable to features or products that depend on Bridge — not on your total business revenue.

• If Bridge is the inference substrate for an AI feature you charge for separately, that revenue is Bridge-dependent.
• If Bridge is one of several features in a multi-feature product, we agree a reasonable apportionment at contract signing.
• If Bridge is internal infrastructure for backend automation and your revenue comes from sources unrelated to AI inference, we agree a notional percentage at contract signing.

We're transparent about apportionment because we want the commercial relationship to be honest and durable.

Support tiers

Every commercial customer picks a support tier. Free customers always have community support. Commercial customers can step up as their needs grow.

Community Support — Free

Community forum, GitHub Issues, docs, tutorials, worked examples. Best-efforts community response.

For: anyone using Bridge — free-tier users and commercial customers who prefer to self-support.

Indie Plus — £960 per year

Everything in Community Support, plus:

• Email support from the DVAI team — five business day response.
• One scheduled 30-minute Bridge AI Agent consultation per calendar quarter.
• Priority routing of bug reports.

For: indie developers and small commercial deployments earning £50,000–£90,000 per year who want direct support without a major spend.

Bridge AI Agent Support — £6,000 per year

Unlimited engagement with our Bridge Voice AI Business Agent during business hours, in 30-minute scheduled windows. Get expert guidance on architecture, configuration, deployment, model selection, performance tuning, error diagnosis, API usage, and best-practice patterns — from our own AI agent that knows Bridge inside out.

Plus quarterly written summaries of every engagement, and automatic escalation of bugs you identify to our development team.

For: commercial customers up to £500,000 annual revenue who need fast, expert support on demand rather than booked through human schedules.

Hybrid Support — £25,000 per year

Everything in Bridge AI Agent Support, plus:

• Direct engagement with a live DVAI support engineer during business hours.
• One business day response for support requests.
• Named support contact at DVAI.
• Quarterly office-hours session with our engineering team.
• Priority routing of bug fixes that affect your deployment.

For: commercial customers in the £500,000–£1,500,000 annual revenue range who need human-mediated support alongside the AI agent.

Enterprise Support — £150,000 per year

Everything in Hybrid Support, plus:

• A named Support Manager dedicated to your account.
• Bridge AI Agent embedded in your team's meetings. Your Bridge Voice AI Agent can join your internal product meetings, technical reviews, and architectural discussions — taking notes, answering technical questions about Bridge in real time, following up on action items. A working demonstration of Bridge's own capability, embedded in your workflow.
• 24/7 critical-bug response for production-impacting issues.
• Quarterly business reviews.
• Priority input to the DVAI Bridge product roadmap.
• SLA: first response within 4 hours, resolution target 24 hours for critical issues.

For: commercial customers above £1,500,000 annual revenue — especially in regulated sectors (healthcare, financial services, legal) where the value of embedded AI support compounds across every client engagement.

The three-year Apache 2.0 conversion

This part is important. Read it carefully.

Each Released Version of DVAI Bridge converts automatically to Apache 2.0 — full open source — three years after its public release date. Not a maybe. It's built into the licence text. Version 4.0.0, released on 15 May 2026, converts to Apache 2.0 on 15 May 2029. Whatever version you're using now, you'll have it freely under a permissive open-source licence three years from its release.

What this means:

• We commit to open source over the long term. The licence is structured so we cannot reverse course. The conversion happens automatically; no action by us is required.
• You always have an exit path. If you've built on Bridge and the contract with us ever ends, the version you're on becomes Apache 2.0 within three years of its release. You're never locked in. The royalties you pay stop being due three years after the release of the version you're using.
• The commercial protection is for the period of greatest commercial value. Three years is enough for us to invest meaningfully in Bridge's development while still committing publicly to its eventual full open-source availability.

We maintain a public list of versions and their Change Dates so you can see exactly when each version becomes Apache 2.0: see CHANGE_DATE.md.

Why this model?

We thought about how to licence Bridge. We considered:

• Pure open source from day one (Apache 2.0 or MIT) — but that leaves us no commercial protection, no recurring revenue to invest in Bridge, and no way to distinguish commercial customers from personal users.
• Pure proprietary — against the spirit of what we wanted to build. We want Bridge to be inspected, learned from, modified, and contributed to.
• High-percentage royalty (the App Store / Google Play 30% model) — unjustified by the value Bridge provides as one component of your product, and would push customers toward building their own or choosing competitors.

The model we picked — source-available, free for personal use, fair commercial royalty, three-year open-source conversion — balances all three. Same structural model used by HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise, CockroachDB, Sentry, and others. It's worked for them; we believe it'll work for us.

We publish our pricing openly. Prospective customers can self-qualify and trust that the rates we quote are the rates we charge. No surprises.

Contributor Licence Agreement

To contribute code, fixes, features, or documentation to Bridge, sign our Contributor Licence Agreement first. Short, standard, modelled on the Apache Foundation Individual CLA. It grants us the licences we need to incorporate your contribution into the project — you keep copyright in your contribution.

When you submit a pull request, our CLA Assistant bot prompts you to sign it before the PR can be merged.

Get in touch

For all enquiries — commercial licensing, general questions about Bridge, support, media — contact info@deepvoiceai.co.

Existing customers: keep using the support channel for your tier.

Frequently asked questions

Is DVAI Bridge open source?

Bridge is source-available. Anyone can read, modify, and use the source code under the DVAI Bridge Community Licence. It's not OSI-approved open source in the strict sense — the licence restricts commercial use. But each Released Version converts automatically to Apache 2.0 three years after release, so the long-term direction is unambiguously open source.

Can I fork Bridge?

Yes. You can fork the repository, modify it, and use the modified version for any Permitted Use (personal, educational, academic, evaluation, internal-only) without payment. To use your fork commercially, you need a commercial licence with us.

Can I redistribute Bridge?

Yes — for non-commercial purposes, provided you retain the licence text, copyright notices, and our attribution. Commercial redistribution needs a commercial licence.

What if my use case is ambiguous — commercial or not?

Contact us. We'd rather discuss your specific case than have you guess. Most ambiguities resolve quickly with a short conversation.

Do I owe royalty on revenue from features that don't use Bridge?

No. Royalty is calculated only on revenue attributable to Bridge-dependent products or features. We agree the apportionment at contract signing.

I'm a startup and £960 per year is too much.

If your annual revenue is below £50,000, the free Community Support tier is fine. Above £50,000, the £960 Indie Plus tier is designed to be accessible while still providing meaningful direct support. Many early-stage commercial customers operate on Community Support alone.

Can I cancel a commercial licence?

Yes — on 90 days' written notice. Royalties accrued up to the date of termination remain payable; prepaid annual support fees are non-refundable. We'd rather understand why you're cancelling and see if there's something we can fix.

Does the patent on Bridge restrict what I can do?

DVAI holds a UK patent application (GB2611312.6) covering the technical innovations in Bridge. Under the Community Licence, we grant you a patent licence for Permitted Use of Bridge at no cost. Commercial customers acquire patent rights under their separate commercial licence. The patent exists primarily to prevent third parties from duplicating Bridge and rebadging it as their own product — not to restrict legitimate community use.

Is there a Contributor Licence Agreement?

Yes — see the CLA page. Short, standard document. You keep copyright in your contribution; we get the licences needed to incorporate it into the dual-licensed project.

This licensing page is the canonical statement of how DVAI Bridge is licensed. We update it periodically. The licence text in the LICENSE file of the DVAI Bridge GitHub repository is the legally binding instrument. Last updated: 15 May 2026.