"Custom license" should change how you read a model page. Moonshot's Kimi K2 ships under its own license, not a standard permissive one. That is a warning label, not a confidence signal. - Custom lab licenses usually allow research and commercial use with conditions: attribution, acceptable use, sometimes redistribution or competing-model-training restrictions. - Grep first for the competing-model-training clause. If your roadmap includes distillation, it can bite. - Then the redistribution terms. Custom licenses love to qualify them. - Do the license comparison before the benchmark comparison. Benchmarks tell you which model is better; licenses tell you which you may ship. I compare custom licenses against standard ones in plain language, and PrivateLLM deploy sets up the licensed model on your own AWS for $50 plus usage.