It's free for noncommercial use. If you use it in your company, your company should pay the membership fee. afaik most openai competitors also use similar usage restriction (e.g. free for noncommercial or research use, contact us for commercial license).

This basically means "Get sued."

There is no clear legal, definition of "noncommercial," and courts have gone all sorts of different way on what constitutes commercial use.

This is where CC NC licenses imploded. A lot of places (hello, MIT!) intentionally use CC NC licenses to make things appear more open than they are.

If you make money using it, pay them. If you're using it for free, don't worry

That's not the way legal cases went. Indeed, they went all over the place.

That's the reason you see "IANAL" disclaimers all over the internet. Legal advice from non-lawyers can be problematic in many ways. Some jurisdictions, although not where I live, you can even go to jail for giving bad legal advice without being a licensed lawyer.

There are a growing number of open source options out there. I was playing with Simon Willison's excellent llm cli tool this morning and tried out some models from the gpt4all project. One of the better ones come from companies like mistral which release their models under the Apache license.

Gpt4all has a UI as well that you can use with models running locally on your laptop.