Just put a price on it, ffs!
Make it extensible with plugins. To gain 100% trust make it open source.
I am happy to pay good money of a local, non-leaking AI based tagging software for video and photos.
I think until they've got a customer base and a proven model a happy median is to put the code in escrow and agree to give the source to paid licensees should the project be abandoned/more than x months without updates/whatever.
I currently have a self-hosted google photos clone and I only paid for the hardware. Highly recommend.