This is not a video I wanted to make. Terms and conditions are boring to me, and the last thing I want to do is become terms-and-conditions guy. But since I’m the one who lit the match on this whole thing, I figured I owed everyone the full recap. The video’s here; the paper trail is below.
Full disclosure up front: I have never done a sponsored video with Higgsfield, and I have been offered them. There’s a reason for that, and I’m not going to recap the whole history here — there’s a fairly gloves-on write-up in Forbes, and a decidedly gloves-off catalog of allegations (and I want to be clear: allegations) at higgsfieldsucks.com.
The original terms: July 23rd
This past Thursday, Higgsfield sent out one of those standard “we’ve updated our terms” emails that nobody reads, because they’re written in legalese and by design unreadable unless you’re billing hours for it. I ran the document through my legal firm of Claude, Fable & Ultracode, and there were problems:
- The output license. Higgsfield got perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, sub-licensable rights to everything you make.
- Training. They could train on anything you input — and keep training on it even after you delete your account.
- The face license. Nothing Bond-villain about thumbprints or retinal scans, but if you uploaded your face for a character, they got a perpetual, irrevocable license to it. Not ownership — but functionally a license they could never lose and you could never take back. And it was sub-licensable, meaning they could pass those rights along.
- The privacy policy (a separate document) said your data can flow to vendors and partners around the world — the US, EU, UK, and China, plus a company in Kazakhstan. Which makes sense, because that’s where Higgsfield is based; they’re proudly Kazakhstan-based and more power to them. It is a little funny that their comms come from 535 Mission Street in San Francisco, which is apparently a WeWork.
- “Unlimited,” Section 10.6. Unlimited tiers run on a separate, slower queue than credit generations, with dynamic throttling for anything they deem “excessive.” I don’t actually have a problem with the slow boat — Runway did the same thing on its unlimited plan. My problem is the “they deem” part.
- The money stuff. Subscription credits don’t roll over, period. Add-on credit packs expire in 90 days. Refunds: a 7-day window, only if you’ve used zero credits, minus a 6% service fee. Renewals: no refunds at all.
- And the kicker: terms can change anytime, and continued use equals acceptance.
I disliked all of that, and I was pretty sure everyone else would too. So I put it up as a thread on X. It’s at 331,000+ views as of this writing — just my post, not counting the splinter threads — and it made the news section on X. Clearly this struck a nerve.
The revision: July 26th
To their credit, Higgsfield was quick to respond. By Sunday around 1 a.m. my time, they’d released a revision — and also added some new stuff nobody asked for, which, honestly, is just a thing lawyers do. My full breakdown of the revised terms is here; the scorecard reads like six wins, one big hold, and a couple of quiet take-backs.
The wins:
- The perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, sub-licensable output language is completely deleted. The license now dies when you delete your content or your account.
- Deleted content won’t be used going forward for training. There’s a line noting that anything already trained on can’t be un-trained — which is fair. It’s baked in. No harm, no foul.
- Promotional use of your outputs now requires the content to be public, or your consent.
- Your indemnification of them went from unlimited to fault-based.
- A bunch of “at our sole discretion” language got scrubbed down to “reasonable.”
The one thing that did not change: training. The training grant in the new terms is word-for-word identical to the original. It’s on by default, and the only consumer opt-out is deleting your content. Enterprise customers get a contractual promise their data won’t be trained on; you don’t.
Here’s my issue with that. At its core, Higgsfield is an aggregator — they don’t have a video model of their own. They do have Soul, their image model. And the day this whole thing kicked off, Higgsfield’s CEO posted on LinkedIn that “at our core we build generative video and image diffusion models,” improved through reinforcement learning. I get what he’s pointing at — Soul, probably the camera-motion work, prompt enhancement, maybe character ID — but “at our core we build generative video and image diffusion models” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. You could argue Krea is in a similar spot with their image model — except Krea open-sourced Krea 2. So, challenge to you, Higgsfield: why not open-source Soul?
The quiet take-backs:
- The privacy policy used to be — in their own language — “a notice, and not part of this agreement.” Now it’s part of the contract. That might be less shady than it sounds; I ran it past a real human lawyer, whose reaction was basically “that should have been in there to begin with.”
- The guarantee of at least 15 days’ notice before terms change is now an undefined “reasonable notice.” Could that be 24 hours? They could certainly try it.
Sponsorships, dark patterns, and Discord receipts
I keep getting asked about the sponsorship thing, so: I’m not shaming anyone who’s done sponsored content with them. My issues are with the dark patterning of the subscription funnel — “unlimited” promised over a lot of fine print — and with cancellation, which judging by their own Discord and the complaints cataloged at higgsfieldsucks.com is basically a nightmare. This was happening live while I was recording: someone asking why they can’t cancel, a “we couldn’t verify your cancellation” response. Another user managed to cancel after tracking down a mod, then got docked 731 credits with time left in their billing cycle. To be fair, as far as I saw those credits were refunded — but you shouldn’t have to hunt down a Discord mod for that to happen. It shouldn’t happen at all. And apparently every major decision runs through one particular mod, so if he’s busy, you wait. If you’re a company reportedly pulling in half a billion dollars a year: give that dude a raise. Give every mod in there a raise.
No vendetta — and some free advice
I don’t have a blood feud with Higgsfield. I’m not naming names, but I’ve gotten outreach from ex-employees and people associated with the company who say a lot of the people working there don’t like the messaging and perception either. The playbook, from my vantage point: capture as many users as possible with aggressive marketing, funnel them through a website that resembles a Vegas casino with upsell tactics, then lock the front door so it’s near impossible to leave. From a business standpoint, sure, that makes money.
So, speaking directly to Higgsfield: try the other direction. Drop the excessive “unlimited” campaigns with fine print. If you’re going to use your users’ outputs for promotional material, reach out to them — pay a licensing fee, even a modest one, or offer credits. Most importantly: ask. Focus on a great user experience so you don’t have to hide the keys to the exit door. You’ve established yourself as a name brand in this space; the name isn’t very good right now, but everyone loves a redemption arc. You’ve already proven that when a thread clears 300,000 views and the replies are that unanimous, you’re willing to change.
At the end of my original tweet I said: I’m not your dad, I’m not a lawyer, make up your own mind. But Higgsfield — I’m going to be your dad for a minute. Do better. Not surface-level better. When my kids were little, I’d drop them off at school and tell them the same thing every day: make good choices.
And that goes for all of us, too. Don’t take my word for any of this — the terms and the privacy policy are public. Drop them into Claude or ChatGPT and see what comes back; the community cross-checking each other is what got the terms revised in the first place. I’m proud of that part. We saw something we didn’t like, we pushed back, and a company reportedly pulling in half a billion a year took a step back. Higgsfield got caught with its hand in the cookie jar, and collectively, we all slapped it. Good job. Everyone go get a cookie.
Me, I’m putting this one to bed and getting back to the creative stuff.