How to Check the Licenses on Everything Inside Your Digital Product

Published July 29, 2026

Part of: Digital Products — our full guide on this topic.

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This site has told you to build the thing roughly two hundred times. Make a digital product. Make a Notion template, a printable, an SVG bundle, wall art. It has told you to write a license for your buyers — spell out what they can and can’t do with it, put a license file in the download, say “commercial use included” because that’s what the Etsy shop owner is asking.

It has also told you, three or four times, in a single line each time, to check the license first.

And then moved on.

That line is where this article starts, because the imperative gets issued constantly and nobody ever delivers it. You have written a license for your buyers. You have probably never read the licenses you’re standing on. Those are opposite directions — one is a promise you make, the other is a set of permissions you were granted — and the first is only worth anything if the second holds it up.

The good news is that this is a checking job, not a legal one. It takes a morning, once, and then it takes ten minutes per product forever.

The quick version

• Your product is a stack, and each layer came from somewhere. Fonts, images, icons, the tool’s built-in elements, the template you started from, the mockup in your listing, the filler text.
• “Commercial use” is four different permissions wearing one label — and the one that breaks things is shipping an asset versus using it.
• An editable template is a different product from a flat export, even when they look identical on screen.
• “Free” tells you the price, not the permission. Free tiers are usually narrower than paid ones, not looser.
• A license is attached to a moment, not to a file. What protects you is the record of where and when you got it.
• If you can’t tell, substitute. Swapping a font costs ten minutes. Unwinding a launch does not.
• This is not legal advice, and nothing below tells you what any specific company’s terms currently say. It tells you what to go and read.

Your product is a stack. Here’s the bill of materials

Open the product you’re closest to shipping and write down every element in it that you did not make from nothing. Most people are surprised by the length of the list, because the layers arrive at different times and from different places, and only the first two feel like “assets”.

Roughly in order of how often each one gets forgotten:

• Fonts. The big one, and the one that people genuinely never think about, because a font feels like part of the software rather than a thing somebody licensed to you. It isn’t. See the next section — this is where the real trap is.
• Photos and illustrations. Including the ones that came bundled inside your design tool, which are supplied under the tool’s content license, not under a blanket permission that came with paying for the tool.
• Icons. Downloaded in a set, months ago, from a site you’d struggle to name now.
• Your design tool’s built-in elements. Shapes, frames, decorative bits, background patterns. These are stock content with a license, exactly like the photos.
• The template you started from. If you began from someone else’s layout — a free template pack, a marketplace file, a starter kit — then the thing you are selling is a derivative of it, and whether that’s allowed is a question with an actual answer sitting in a document somewhere.
• The mockups in your listing. Product mockups are usually downloaded PSDs or scene generators with their own terms, and they’re doubly easy to forget because they’re marketing rather than product. They’re still someone’s work, and they’re the most public part of your listing.
• Music and sound, if you’re selling video, a course, or anything with audio.
• Code snippets, if your product is a tool, script, spreadsheet with macros, or anything with logic in it. Open-source code is licensed code — permissively, usually, but with conditions like attribution that are trivial to satisfy and easy to miss entirely.
• The sample content inside the template. The quote you dropped in as filler. The paragraph of real text you pasted to see how the layout breathed. The photo standing in for “customer photo here”. These ship with the file if you forget to strip them, and they were never yours.

That last one is worth pausing on, because it’s pure carelessness rather than a judgement call, and it’s the easiest thing on the list to fix: before you export, replace every placeholder with something you own or something generic.

The distinction that actually matters: using versus shipping

Here is the single idea that resolves most of the confusion in this topic.

Using an asset means it ends up baked into a flat output. The font becomes pixels in a PNG. The photo becomes part of a printable PDF. The buyer receives an image, and cannot extract the ingredients back out.

Shipping an asset means the ingredient itself goes out the door. The buyer gets an editable file that contains the font, or that requires them to install the font. They get the source file with the stock photo still in it as a separate, extractable layer. They get a template they can open, change, and re-export.

These are different acts, and a great many licenses treat them very differently — permitting the first freely while restricting, separately pricing, or flatly forbidding the second. It is entirely normal for an asset to be fine in a poster and not fine in an editable template built from the same design.

Which is why this catches template sellers specifically. If you sell Notion templates, spreadsheet templates, Canva templates, or anything else where the editability is the product, you are in shipping territory by definition. The whole value proposition is that the buyer can open it up. So when you read a license, don’t stop at the paragraph that says commercial use is permitted. Find the paragraph about templates, redistribution, and “as-is” — that’s the one that applies to you.

”Commercial use” is four permissions, not one

The phrase gets used as though it were a single switch. It isn’t. When you’re reading a license, you are looking for answers to four separate questions, and an asset can permit some and not others:

1. Can I use it in something I sell? The one everybody checks.
2. Can I ship the asset itself to my buyer? The use-versus-ship line above. The one that breaks templates.
3. Can I use it in something I give away free? Sounds like the safe direction, and often isn’t — a free lead magnet can end up distributed far more widely than a paid product, and some licenses care about distribution volume rather than whether money changed hands.
4. Can I use it in marketing? Listing images, thumbnails, social posts, ads. Frequently governed by different rules from product use, and frequently the thing nobody reads about because marketing doesn’t feel like a product.

Ask all four every time. It takes a minute longer than asking one, and it’s the difference between “I checked” and “I checked the part I happened to think of”.

”Free” is about price, not permission

Free-to-download and free-to-sell-with are unrelated ideas that share a word.

Three things worth internalising:

A free tier is often narrower than a paid one. People assume “free” means fewer strings. It usually means fewer permissions — the paid tier is frequently what buys the broader rights, which is precisely why the paid tier exists.

“Free for personal use” is an enormous category. It is one of the most common license types for fonts and graphics, and it is a straightforward no for anything you’re selling. It’s also easy to miss, because the download button doesn’t say it — the license file does.

Free from an aggregator tells you nothing. A site listing ten thousand free fonts is telling you what it charges. What the designer permits is a separate question with a separate answer, and on some of those sites the answer is genuinely unknown because the original license was never carried along with the file.

And the worst case: an asset with no license information at all. Absence of a license is not permission. It means you don’t know — and building a product on something you don’t know about is exactly the situation this whole article exists to get you out of.

A license is attached to a moment, not to a file

This is the part that turns a one-time panic into a permanent system, and it’s the highest-value habit here.

The file sitting on your drive doesn’t carry its own terms with it. You agreed to something on a particular day, on a particular plan, from a particular source — and any of those can change afterwards. Marketplaces update their terms. Assets get withdrawn. Your subscription lapses and you’re on the free tier with the paid-tier elements still sitting in your finished product.

What protects you isn’t remembering. It’s a note.

For every product you sell, keep a plain file listing each non-original asset: what it is, where it came from, the date, which tier or plan, and the license type. Where the license is a page rather than a file, save a copy of the text alongside it — not a link, a copy, because pages change and links rot.

That file is small, boring, and does three jobs at once. It answers a buyer’s question in thirty seconds. It tells you instantly which products are affected if a source ever changes its terms. And it’s the same discipline that makes backing up your business and updating a product sane instead of archaeological. Keep it with your other written-down processes.

What to do when you genuinely can’t tell

You’ll hit assets where you read the license and still don’t know. That’s normal — licenses are often written for a broader audience than a one-person shop, and your exact case may not be addressed.

The answer is not “it’s probably fine.” In order of preference:

Substitute. By far the best option and chronically underused. There are good open-licensed fonts, images and icons with clear, readable, permissive terms designed for exactly this. Swapping a typeface before you launch takes ten minutes and permanently removes the question. Swapping it after two hundred people have bought the file does not.

Ask the source. If it’s an independent creator or a small marketplace, email them and describe precisely what you want to do — “I’d like to use this in an editable template that my buyers can open and edit; is that permitted?” Keep the reply. People answer this more often than you’d think, and a written yes is worth more than an hour of interpretation.

Buy the tier that clearly covers it, if one exists. If a marketplace offers an extended or ship-it license, that product exists because the standard one doesn’t cover your case. That’s information in itself.

Or don’t ship that element. Sometimes the honest answer is that the design has to change. That’s a bad afternoon; it isn’t a bad outcome.

What you shouldn’t do is proceed on the basis that it’s a small product and nobody will look. The most likely consequences here are mundane rather than dramatic — a listing pulled, a marketplace complaint, a product you have to rebuild after it’s already selling, an email from a buyer you can’t answer — but “mundane” still means a live product taken down while you scramble, and every one of those was avoidable for the price of reading a document.

The loop this closes: you can’t promise what you don’t have

Come back to where we started.

When you write your own license — the file in the download that tells buyers what they may do — you are making a promise. Personal use always. Commercial use for finished physical items. No redistributing the files themselves. That’s a good, standard, honest set of terms, and this site recommends being explicit about it, because licensing confusion is the single biggest source of disputes in the category.

But a promise about rights is only worth as much as the rights underneath it.

If you tell a buyer “commercial use included” and your headline font doesn’t permit commercial use, you’ve made a promise you don’t own. If you sell an editable template containing a stock element the source doesn’t allow you to pass on, then the thing your buyer paid for — the editability — is the part that isn’t yours to sell. And the buyer following your terms in good faith is the one who inherits the problem, which is a genuinely unpleasant way to treat someone who paid you.

This is the same shape as handling a data deletion request: publishing the document is the easy half, and the promise inside it is about a system you may never have looked at.

It also runs longer than the shop does. A licence you granted is not revoked by you stopping — the buyer keeps what they bought whether or not you are still trading — which is why closing a business down is a sensible moment to check that nothing you shipped is still being distributed under terms you no longer meet.

Thirty minutes, before your next launch

You don’t need to audit five years of work. You need a routine that runs once per product, and a short backlog.

For the next product you ship, before it goes live:

1. List every non-original element. Use the bill of materials above as a prompt — it’s ordered by what people forget.
2. For each one, find the actual license. The file in the download folder, or the terms page on the site you got it from. Not what you remember; the document.
3. Ask all four questions — sell, ship, give away, market — against how this product delivers the asset.
4. Strip the placeholders. Filler quotes, stand-in photos, that paragraph of real text.
5. Substitute anything unclear. Now, while it’s cheap.
6. Write the asset note and save it with the product source files.
7. Then write your buyer license, knowing it’s backed by something.

For what you already sell, work backwards from money: your best seller first, then anything where you’ve promised commercial rights, then everything else — and be willing to retire a product rather than research it, if it isn’t earning.

None of this is glamorous and none of it makes a sale. What it does is make the thing you’re selling genuinely yours to sell — which is the quiet precondition for everything else on this site. Build it once, sell it forever only works if nobody can take it down.

And it is worth knowing what “take it down” can mean at the sharp end. A complaint about one image, font or clip does not always stop at that listing — on a lot of marketplaces the account itself goes with it, which is a much longer week than swapping a photo would have been. Twenty minutes of reading is the cheap version of that.

This article is general guidance, not legal advice. It doesn’t tell you what any particular company’s terms say or what the rules are where you live — it tells you how to go and find out what you actually agreed to.