40,145 Stars and a 6-Point Hacker News Thread: Auditing VoiceStudio, the 'Fully-Local ElevenLabs Alternative' Whose Default Engine Is CC-BY-NC

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a sentence in VoiceStudio’s Hugging Face dependency that decides whether the product is usable for the thing most people want it for. It is not in the README, not on the website, and not in the app. It is in the model card of the engine the app installs by default:

Our code is released under the Apache 2.0 License. The pre-trained model is licensed under the CC-BY-NC due to constraints from its training data (e.g., Emilia).

CC-BY-NC means non-commercial. VoiceStudio’s own landing page tells you the opposite — “Run it, for anything, including at work and for money… no field-of-use restriction.” The application really is AGPL-3.0, and running the application commercially really is fine. The model weights it ships with are not, and one of them is the default engine.

Licensing on SoloSoft

40,145 Stars and a 6-Point Hacker News Thread: Auditing VoiceStudio, the 'Fully-Local ElevenLabs Alternative' Whose Default Engine Is CC-BY-NC