It’s also very common for a small team (or individual) at a large company to use a tool, and the tool can plaster that logo on their homepage even if the use case was insignificant.
For a lot of companies, logos on homepages is more of an “ask for forgiveness later” type of thing. Not uncommon to do it without permission.
It’s also very common for TOS to include the rights to use your company logo for marketing purposes by default.
For us, every single one of the logos we display on https://retool.com has a committed contract with Retool where they agreed to display their logo. (Generally our champion does need to go ask a VP; in return we offer a discount.) 100% of the logos that we show pay us more than $50k a year. (80% of them pay us more than $100k a year, and some % of them pay us more than $1M a year, hah.) We wouldn't want to display their logo otherwise! (Since it'd be misleading, but also because it'd be problematic — if say — Taco Bell engineer came and asked us who exactly is using Retool at Taco Bell.)
that's awesome. Just a thought, I wonder if users would appreciate knowing that. To me, the reason I asked is I tend to assume the worst (minimal permission, 1 person in the org, no contract, etc...). Maybe just me, but especially so when it's huge names like Amazon or Stripe
For a lot of companies, logos on homepages is more of an “ask for forgiveness later” type of thing. Not uncommon to do it without permission.
It’s also very common for TOS to include the rights to use your company logo for marketing purposes by default.