License & rights of use

License & rights of use.

Bethaniel is provided under a custom source-available license. Please read the terms below carefully.

Free use

You may use Bethaniel free of charge if you meet all of the following conditions:

Personal / non-commercial use — any individual using Bethaniel for their own manuscripts, hobby projects, or personal editing needs; OR
Small-business commercial use — a company, team, or sole trader where:
- The organization has fewer than 5 employees, contractors, consultants, or regular users; AND
- The organization's annual gross revenue is less than USD $1,000,000.

Commercial license required

If your organization does not meet both of the criteria above (i.e. 5+ people or ≥ $1 M revenue), you must obtain a commercial license before using Bethaniel. Please reach out via the contact form and I'll get you sorted.

Restrictions

Regardless of whether you qualify for free use:

No redistribution — You may not redistribute, sublicense, sell, or share the Bethaniel source code or compiled binaries to third parties.
No modification — You may not fork, modify, adapt, or create derivative works of Bethaniel for your own commercial product or service without prior written permission.
No reverse engineering of prompts — The prompt engineering, system prompts, and editing logic are proprietary. You may not extract them for use in other products.

Attribution

Attribution is encouraged but not required. If Bethaniel helped you ship your book or edit your manuscript, a mention is always appreciated — but you're under no obligation.

No warranty

Bethaniel is provided "AS IS", without warranty of any kind, express or implied. The author(s) are not liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.

Model licenses

Models used in Bethaniel are Apache 2.0 licensed. For more details, see: github.com/SimonGrund/bethaniel/blob/main/MODEL_LICENSES.md

System requirements

What you'll need.

Platform	Minimum version	Notes
macOS	12 Monterey or later	Apple Silicon & Intel both supported
Windows	Windows 10 (64-bit) or later
Linux	glibc 2.31 or newer	Debian 11, Ubuntu 20.04, or equivalent

Running Betty on your own machine

Memory	8 GB of RAM free while she runs. In practice that means a machine with 12 GB or more — or 8 GB with every other program closed.
Disk	Approx. 3 GB free
Speed	An Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer) or an NVIDIA graphics card with 8 GB of video memory or more. Without one, she runs on the processor alone, and a novel takes most of a day.
Processor only	Intel Macs, AMD and Intel graphics, and NVIDIA cards with 6 GB or less.

In the cloud, none of this applies — the versions above are the whole list.

Expected run times.

One edit of a whole manuscript with Local Betty, by the machine she runs on. These are the app's own estimates — the same ones its Run button shows before your first job.

Machine	60,000 words	90,000 words
Processor only	5½ h	8½ h
Apple M-series	2 h	3 h
Apple M-series Pro	1 h 10 min	1 h 40 min
Apple M-series Max	35 min	50 min
Apple M-series Ultra	25 min	40 min
NVIDIA, 8 GB (e.g. RTX 4060)	1 h 10 min	1 h 40 min
NVIDIA, 12 GB (e.g. RTX 4070)	40 min	1 h
NVIDIA, 16 GB (e.g. RTX 4080)	30 min	45 min
NVIDIA, 24 GB (e.g. RTX 4090)	20 min	30 min
NVIDIA, 32 GB (RTX 5090)	15 min	20 min

Only the RTX 5090 figure is measured; the rest are scaled from it by memory speed and rounded down, to err on the cautious side. The passes you pick change it, and a style sheet adds one more check per chunk. After your first job, the app replaces the estimate with your machine's measured speed.