Simpler Font Licensing: Introducing V2
Buying a font is harder than it should be. Navigating different license types, figuring out if you need a separate license for your client or design agency, and keeping track of how many installations or website visitors you’re allowed — it’s way too complicated. Add the fact that every foundry has a unique license agreement, with their own definitions and terms, and even the simplest licensing requirement can feel like a daunting problem.
This was never the intention. No type foundry wants to confuse you, it’s just difficult to move away from the ‘industry standard’ — and for the foundry, not without risk. But regardless, we think it’s necessary.
The general standard that type foundries have fallen into is to separate licenses into categories for desktop, web, and so on. There’s some logic to this in theory: you don’t pay for webfonts unless you’re using them, or for app licensing if you don’t have an app. It’s paying for “only what you need”. Except in practice, that isn’t so straightforward: a desktop font for a one-off project doesn’t cost less than one licensed as a long-term corporate workhorse. In most cases, separating file formats into multiple licenses just means projects spanning multiple formats are more expensive, and the whole process is more complicated. It also means that any project that doesn’t fit neatly into a predefined category is much harder to license.
And there’s a more fundamental issue with pricing fonts according to their usage, like the number of installations or website visitors: usage isn’t value. A 3-person design team in a 90-person company will almost certainly have a higher budget and a wider audience than a small, 3-person studio — in other words, they will be able to extract more value from the same fonts. Because of this, the traditional method of licensing fonts ends up on average over-charging smaller organisations relative to larger ones.
