Quick one if you're about to build something on top of a self-hosted AI app. We track 161 of them, and for most GitHub reads a standard license: Apache-2.0 on 63, MIT on 57.
25 of them (16%) ship a LICENSE file GitHub can't map to a standard license. Usually that means custom terms, a dual license, or a normal license with extra conditions added. Some big names are in that group: n8n, AutoGPT, Dify and Open WebUI.
Read the file before you build on one of these. Running it at home is rarely the issue. Hosting it for other people, or selling something on top of it, is where those terms start to matter.
Copyleft is a small slice. 12 apps use AGPL-3.0 (Firecrawl, Khoj, SillyTavern and others) and 3 use GPL-3.0. AGPL only matters if you change the code and offer it to others over a network; on a home server it changes nothing.
Starter templates go the other way. All 89 starters on our second list are permissive: 70 MIT, 17 Apache-2.0, 2 BSD. Makes sense, they exist to be forked into products.
Every app on the list shows its license as GitHub reports it, so the ones worth a closer read are easy to spot: https://github.com/archestack/best-of-selfhosted-ai
Written with help from AI tools. Numbers from the list's public data, checked on 2026-10-09.
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