Font licensing is ill, please help heal it

The desktop vs. web font licensing has been baffling web designers and developers for years, and unfortunately things don’t seem to change for the better. Fonts sellers are adopting without questioning the same illogical license model with fixed pricing for desktop and pageviews-based pricing for websites, sometimes even pageviews and per domain pricing.

First, let’s see the desktop licensing.

Desktop fonts pricing

For desktop formats, fonts can be used in an unlimited amount of projects. Some are even used in television and streaming for series and movie titles, a type of project usually including bigger budget and profitability.

Desktop fonts have a fixed one-time payment price, the license fee is not per project and the buyer doesn’t have to pay additional licensing fees if the project becomes successful and surpasses a certain number of readers or viewers. Please keep that in mind while we move on to webfonts.

Web fonts pricing

It’s very hard to find a seller or marketplace where web fonts are not priced per domain and/or per number of pageviews. The strategy or reason behind this pricing remains a mystery.

For desktop, the value is immensely greater than for web. While for graphic, print or TV/media the value is the design itself and so the font plays a most important role, on the web visitors come for content and information, not for the font it’s rendered in. Current pricing is exactly inverse proportional to the value brought by the font.

A possibly better pricing model for fonts

A more sensible approach would be pricing based on the value the product brings. It seems that many times type designers themselves don’t know which formats of their typefaces are used. In a long discussion with some of them in which I was a bit baffled to find out that they thought logos on websites use webfonts for example, so I decided to write an article about different font formats and their use.

You cannot have a good pricing model without knowing where your product brings the most value, and HOW is your product used. When there are multiple formats, you need to know which is used where.

Rethinking licensing and target buyers

I wish foundries and font authors reconsidered, and replace with something more logical and better targeted. In their quest for big companies buying their product, they’re ignoring and shutting down on a huge target buyer category: web designers.

In a bit of irony, the very clients they’re seeking (big companies and big budgets) started creating their own custom fonts, as a more convenient alternative than paying big subscriptions and the bonus perk of having something uniquely tailored for them. The most well know example is IBM, which created the IBM Plex font family and released it as open source. Many re-brandings started including a custom font.

Unlimited pageviews costs thousands of dollars, and one of the biggest price tag I found for a webfont version of a typeface was actually 182227 euros for 999999999 pageviews (not unlimited, just the biggest number that could be specified in purchase options). This cost is absolutely ridiculous, and it’s actually cheaper to commission a custom typeface.

Simply put:

Desktop	the purpose is design (movies, magazines, logo/branding, merchandise etc.), so typography plays a key role and brings immense value mostly paid work, or profitable projects	one-time payment unlimited projects small price
Web	people visit websites for information they’re interested in, not design and not the font in which text is rendered in the vast majority of websites are not commercial projects	pay per domain and/or pageviews exponentially increasing price

Using pageviews as a unit of measure for profit gives a completely wrong perspective. Bigger scale doesn’t mean money. A non-profit organization can have a lot of pageviews, but zero revenue. Same goes for personal/presentation websites and many other types.

The desktop variant usually costs less or the same as the smallest webfont price, while the web variant quickly jumps to hundreds and thousands of dollars.

Pageview counting affects website performance negatively

There’s also the website performance issue. To count pageviews some sellers require loading scripts or css or some other external resource on your website. Webfonts should be only self hosted, with maybe cdn options as a beginner-friendly alternative.

Problematic client invoicing for pageviews-based pricing

Please put yourself in a web designer or web developer’s shoes. Imagine this situation: doing client work and using a font paid by pageviews. What do you say to your client? “Please let me know when you reach X pageviews so I can update the license and charge you again?”

Epilogue

The last argument pro rethinking the font licensing is that there is no extra work in converting a desktop font to web format. It takes a few seconds to use a conversion tool.

If you can, please help fix the license model and bring it to the logic side!

Thank you for bearing with me on this one.

— Alina