Blender's GPL licence carries no revenue or seat limit

The picture

Blender is developed and distributed by the Blender Foundation under the GNU General Public License, as stated on the Foundation's own licensing page. That page states Blender 'can be used commercially by artists, by studios to make animation films or VFX, by game artists to work on commercial games', and that work created with the software belongs entirely to its creator. The current stable line, per Blender's own release notes, is version 5.1, released 17 March 2026, with point releases 5.1.1 on 14 April 2026 and 5.1.2 on 19 May 2026. No page in either document attaches a revenue threshold, seat count, subscription term or commercial-use restriction to any of these releases.

What the documents show

Every other tool surveyed in this batch - Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, Houdini, Twinmotion, RealityScan, Unity - states at least one of a revenue threshold, a funding threshold, a seat-subscription requirement or a bundling condition on its own pricing page. Blender's licensing page states none of these for the core application; the only condition the GPL imposes, as the page describes it, concerns scripts or modified copies of Blender that a user chooses to redistribute, which must carry a GPL-compatible licence once published. That condition governs redistributing Blender's own code, not the models, renders or films a studio produces with it. The release notes are silent on licensing entirely, consistent with the licensing page's claim that no per-release condition applies.

What it is allowed to decide

A software licence answers a provenance and commercial question, not a technical one: it says who may run the tool and under what obligation, not whether a model is dimensionally accurate or a render photometrically defensible. On its own this supports class 3, commercial, at most. It holds Provenance for the tool itself, since the terms are published and unconditional. It does not hold Auditability for any specific project file, since a GPL grant on the software says nothing about whether a given file is versioned, reproducible or documented.

The disclosure label

A disclosure travelling with a Blender-made image would read: produced in Blender under the GNU General Public License, with no revenue threshold, seat limit or commercial restriction attached to the tool itself, class 3 commercial at most; Provenance held for the software licence, Auditability not established for this project file; dated 16 September 2026; asserted by the artist or studio that made the file.

• Does an add-on or plugin used alongside Blender carry the same unrestricted terms, or a separate commercial licence of its own?
• Is the absence of a licensing cost being read as an absence of production risk, when the two are unrelated?
• Does the project's archival requirement depend on Blender specifically, given that no subscription can lapse and cut off access to the tool?

Editorial reading: a licence with no conditions is unusual enough in this toolset to be the headline fact for a first-time buyer, ahead of any comparison of render engines or modelling features.