Legal

Open-source licenses

Last updated: June 30, 2026

SnailText is built on open-source software. This page lists the components we ship or download, with their licenses and links to the source. Using these open licenses does not affect SnailText's own commercial license.

The same list is available inside the app under Settings → About → Open source.

Speech and audio models

• OpenAI Whisper (GGML models) MIT Speech recognition models © 2022 OpenAI
• NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 CC-BY-4.0 Speech recognition model (optional) © NVIDIA Corporation
• Silero VAD MIT Voice activity detection © 2024 Silero Team

Inference and runtime

• whisper.cpp MIT Whisper inference engine © 2023-2024 Georgi Gerganov
• whisper-rs MIT / Apache-2.0 Rust bindings for whisper.cpp © tazz4843 and contributors
• parakeet-rs MIT Rust bindings for Parakeet © Enes Altun
• ONNX Runtime (ort) MIT / Apache-2.0 ONNX inference (VAD, Parakeet) © pyke

FFmpeg (optional video / audio decoder)

SnailText can decode video files and additional audio formats for bulk transcription. To do this it downloads a prebuilt FFmpeg binary on demand and runs it as a separate process (it is not linked into the app). Because we distribute third-party builds, the license differs by platform and each must be attributed separately:

• FFmpeg (Windows build) LGPL-3.0 Build by BtbN FFmpeg-Builds (win64-lgpl) © FFmpeg authors
• FFmpeg (macOS build) GPL-3.0 Build by osxexperts.net (ffmpeg arm64) © FFmpeg authors

FFmpeg project: ffmpeg.org. License texts: LGPL-3.0 · GPL-3.0. The source for each build is published by its respective build maintainer at the links above. SnailText's own code is not a derivative work of FFmpeg: it is invoked as a separate process (mere aggregation).

App framework and UI

• Tauri MIT / Apache-2.0 Desktop app framework © Tauri Programme within The Commons Conservancy
• React MIT UI library © Meta Platforms, Inc.
• Tailwind CSS MIT CSS framework © Tailwind Labs Inc.
• shadcn/ui MIT UI components © shadcn
• lucide-react ISC Icon set © Lucide Contributors

The full dependency list, including transitive dependencies, is in the project's package manifests. If you believe an attribution is missing or incorrect, email us at [email protected].

Adapted from the open-source Basecamp/37signals policy template, used under their open license.