DVAI Bridge Licensing

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

DVAI Bridge is source-available software developed by Deep Voice AI Limited. It's free to use, modify, and learn from in personal, educational, academic, and evaluation contexts. When you're using Bridge as part of a commercial product that generates revenue, we ask you to enter a commercial licence with us.

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

What is DVAI Bridge?

DVAI Bridge is the universal local-inference substrate that lets developers integrate on-device AI inference into their applications across browser, server, desktop, and mobile platforms. One API, one library family, one consistent developer experience. Bridge removes the framework-bridge overhead that has historically made on-device AI slow and awkward in mobile applications, and adds distributed-inference capability across the devices a user already owns.

Bridge is publicly available on GitHub. Anyone can read the source, fork it, learn from it, contribute to it, or use it 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 — anyone can read, modify, and use the code. Personal, educational, academic, evaluation, and internal-only use is free. Commercial use, defined as use in a product or service that generates revenue, requires a separate commercial licence from Deep Voice AI Limited. Each Released Version converts automatically to the Apache 2.0 open-source licence three years after its public release date, so the long-term direction of Bridge is unambiguously open source.

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

What you can do without a commercial licence

Under the Community Licence, you can do all of the following at no cost:

• Use Bridge for personal projects. Build anything you want for yourself. Experiment. Learn. Hack on it.
• Use Bridge in education. Teach it. Learn from it. Use it in coursework. Build with it in academic projects.
• Use Bridge in academic research. Cite it. Reference it. Build research products on it where the research outputs are publicly disseminated.
• Evaluate Bridge for up to 90 days. Take it for a spin in a commercial context to see if it fits before committing to a commercial licence.
• Use Bridge for internal-only purposes. Deploy it inside your organisation for internal tooling, where the resulting capability isn't distributed to or used by parties outside your organisation and doesn't generate revenue from external parties.
• Contribute to Bridge. Submit pull requests, file issues, propose features. We welcome community contributions under our Contributor Licence Agreement.

You can do all of this freely, modify the code, redistribute it, and build derivative works. The conditions are that you retain our attribution notices, include the licence text with any redistribution, and continue to comply with the licence terms.

When you need a commercial licence

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

• You're integrating Bridge into a product or service that you're selling, licensing, hosting, or making available to third parties on terms that generate revenue.
• You're providing inference services or AI services to third parties using Bridge.
• Your organisation generates revenue and Bridge is part of any commercial offering, even if Bridge itself isn't directly monetised.

If you're not sure whether your use case requires a commercial licence, contact 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 within that band, so you only pay the higher percentage on the portion of your revenue that's in the higher band — not on your total revenue.

A few worked examples so it's clear:

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

Why a marginal-rate structure? Because we want our royalty to be fair across customer sizes. A startup at £200,000 shouldn't pay the same rate as an established company at £5 million. Marginal rates reflect that growth means our royalty scales smoothly with you, not in steps that punish crossing 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, revenue from that feature is Bridge-dependent.
• If Bridge is one of several features in a multi-feature product, we agree a reasonable apportionment with you at contract signing.
• If Bridge is internal infrastructure for backend automation where your revenue comes from sources unrelated to AI inference, we agree a notional percentage with you at contract signing.

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

Support tiers

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

Community Support — Free

Access to our community forum, GitHub Issues, documentation, tutorials, and worked examples. Response on a best-efforts community basis.

For: anyone using Bridge, including free-tier users and commercial customers who prefer to operate self-supported.

Indie Plus — £960 per year

Everything in Community Support, plus:

• Email support from the DVAI team with 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 with revenue between £50,000 and £90,000 per year who want some 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 optimisation, error diagnosis, API usage, and best-practice patterns — from our own AI agent, which knows Bridge inside out.

Plus quarterly written summaries of all your engagements, 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 but want it 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 affecting 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, and following up on action items. It's 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, particularly 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 and we want it understood clearly.

Each Released Version of DVAI Bridge automatically converts to Apache 2.0 — full open source — three years after its public release date. That's 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 when it was released.

This means:

• We commit to open source over the long term. The licence is structured so that 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 your contract with us ever ends, the version you're on will become Apache 2.0 within three years of its release. You're never locked in.
• The commercial protection is for the period of greatest commercial value. The three-year window 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 hard about how to license Bridge. We considered:

• Pure open source from day one (Apache 2.0 or MIT) — but that would mean we have no commercial protection, no recurring revenue to invest in Bridge's continued development, and no way to differentiate commercial customers from personal users.
• Pure proprietary — but that's 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) — but that would be 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 chose — source-available, free for personal use, fair commercial royalty, three-year open-source conversion — balances all of these. It's the same structural model used by HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise, CockroachDB, Sentry, and others. It's worked for them and we believe it'll work for us.

We publish our pricing openly because we want prospective customers to self-qualify and to trust that the rates we quote are what we charge. No surprises.

Contributor Licence Agreement

If you'd like to contribute code, fixes, features, or documentation to Bridge, you'll need to sign our Contributor Licence Agreement first. It's a short, standard document modelled on the Apache Foundation Individual CLA. It grants us the licences we need to incorporate your contribution into the project while you retain copyright in your contribution.

If you submit a pull request, our CLA Assistant bot will automatically prompt you to sign it before the PR can be merged.

Get in touch

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

For support enquiries from existing customers, please continue to use 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, because the licence restricts commercial use. However, each Released Version converts automatically to the Apache 2.0 open-source licence 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. If you want to use your fork for commercial purposes, 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 requires a commercial licence.

What if my use case is ambiguous — am I 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 have to pay 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 with you at contract signing.

What if 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. If you're 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. It's a short, standard document. You retain 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.