Honest admission: there is no definitive ranking of license checker apps, because the good ones are databases, not apps. Here are the five kinds of tools founders actually use. - A general AI assistant: ask it to explain a clause in plain English. Fast, occasionally confident about something it invented. Starting point, not verdict. - The license text itself, searchable on your phone. Beats a PDF in a browser tab every time. - A checklist: grant, thresholds, restrictions, attribution, version match. Same order, every model. - A notes app for your license log: model, version, license, date, link. The artifact diligence asks for. - A proper checker with a real database: instant commercial rights lookups someone else keeps current. Judge it on source citations, version tracking, and freshness. I keep 200 models compared in plain language, and PrivateLLM deploy sets up the licensed model on your own AWS for $50 plus usage.