The WELL is released under the TRACE Human Task Data License (HTD). The whole license is built around one idea: stay out of your way until the work is actually making money. You build freely now, and share a little of the upside later — only once there is real revenue, and even then barely.

Build freely. Download, train, fine-tune, evaluate, benchmark, deploy, publish, and even manufacture — at no cost. There is no fee to negotiate, no gate to clear, and no permission to wait on; you accept the license terms and get to work. Academic research, experimentation, pilots, demonstrations, and pre-revenue products all live on the free side of the line.

Then a fee that barely registers. Once a product is actually selling, or a service is actually charging, the license fee is closer to a rounding error than a cost — a sliver of the revenue it rides on, sized to disappear into the margin. Pre-revenue services get up to two years to grow first, and the free-to-paid boundary is fixed in the version you accept, so you always know exactly where you stand.

A license that works with you. Because TRACE earns only when you do, the whole design points one way: getting the data into your systems and keeping it working — for you and for the people who produced it.

Clean to build a company on. The fee is a cost of goods, not equity — it never touches your cap table or takes a stake in what you build. And properly licensed, KYC-sourced, provenance-tracked training data is the kind of clean sourcing that holds up in diligence.

Provenance and verification. Every record carries provenance metadata, and the dataset is built for downstream traceability through provenance records and watermark verification as those methods mature. This protects honest licensees and keeps the contributor revenue-share accounting auditable.

Never used to identify people. The license categorically prohibits using the data — or any model trained on it — to identify, re-identify, or biometrically recognize the people who produced it. This is a core term, not a configurable setting.

The full license suite — base license, standard commercial terms, and policies — is available for review on request.