License

What you generate

Everything the tools output is yours: palettes from the generator, colors pulled from your photos, gradients, the CSS, SCSS, Tailwind, JSON and design-token exports, the PDF swatch sheet, and the readouts from the contrast checker.

We do not license these to you, because there is nothing for us to license. A color is a coordinate, and a palette is a handful of them arrived at by published arithmetic — the same math anyone with the same formulas would arrive at. That is not a work we could hold rights in, so no permission from us is needed, no credit is required, and nothing about your project has to change because you used this site. Credit is welcome and never expected.

One caveat that is not ours to waive: a color combination that is someone’s registered trade dress is still theirs. Reproducing another brand’s exact palette to pass work off as theirs is a trademark problem no palette tool can license away — this applies just as much to colors read out of a live site by the inspector.

What we keep

• The site’s writing. Guides, articles, comparison pages and this policy are ours. Quote them with a link; please do not republish them wholesale.
• The name and the mark. “HueGrade” and the split-circle logo are ours. You may use them to refer to us — a link, a review, a comparison, a screenshot of the tool in an article — but not on your own product, and not in a way that suggests we endorse or are affiliated with it.
• The source code of the site and its backend. It is not open source and is not licensed for reuse. The color math it is built on is public knowledge and always was.

Curated palettes and the color reference

The palettes in Explore, the named colors behind the reference and the Tailwind scale we mirror are all either common knowledge or published by their owners. Use them freely. Where a set belongs to someone else — the Tailwind palette is Tailwind Labs’, the Pantone names are Pantone LLC’s — it stays theirs; our nearest-Pantone readout is an approximation for reference, not a licensed color specification, and it is not a substitute for an official Pantone book when a printer needs an exact match.

Images you bring

• Your own uploads stay yours, and stay on your device — they are processed in the browser and never reach our servers.
• Stock photos come from Pixabay under the Pixabay Content License. Broadly permissive, including commercially, but the terms are theirs and worth reading before you ship one — we credit the photographer in the interface even though the licence does not require it.
• Anything you fetch by URL is subject to whatever licence it already had. Sampling colors from an image does not give you the image.

Open source we build on

HueGrade stands on other people’s work, and their licences travel with it — among them culori for color conversion, React and Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Lucide for icons, jsPDF for the print export, and Filerobot for the photo editor. Each is used under its own licence, MIT in most cases, and their copyright notices remain with them.

Fonts: Inter and JetBrains Mono, both under the SIL Open Font License.

Questions

If you need something in writing for a client or a procurement review — confirmation that palettes carry no attribution requirement is the usual one — ask us and we will send it. See also the terms of service, which govern use of the service itself.