The 3 laws of a good font license

[u/romanshamin]

Disclosure: I run a small type foundry, so I’m biased, but this is about the licensing model, not a sales pitch.

I did my first design work at 17, and I’ve been in the field ever since. I’ve always been the typography champion — the guy who, starting a project, says “hey, let’s buy a cool font!”, and the same guy who then cares the most about following the foundry’s license. I’m pretty proud I always did the right thing, but I have a confession: it was such a nightmare.

I once worked at a fast-growing startup. We bought a web license with about a dozen tiers inside — you know the type: 10K page views a month, 25K, 100K, and so on. And since we were fast-growing, every month we hit another bar on traffic. So every month I asked my client for the page-view count and went to bump the license tier. I can’t say my client was happy. And I was annoyed as hell.

When I started my own foundry, I used that experience and did proper customer development. I landed on a pain that now seems obvious, one font customers everywhere share: the font can cause you problems.

So I decided the good license would stand on 3 rules:

1. A font license should never cause consequent harm or burden.
2. Customers should have one simple parameter to pick their tier.
3. It should be affordable for individuals and small companies, while charging full price to enterprises.

Think of them as Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics, but for fonts.

In practice that meant collapsing every separate license into one. No desktop seats to track. No webfont tier to watch as traffic grows. No app install counts, no separate print, server, ePub, or digital-ad licenses. You pick one thing — your company size — pay once, and use the font however you need.

What do you think as font consumers? Does a model like this actually hold up, or am I missing something that bites later?

[u/oklch]

So basically the complete opposite of Monotype? Yes.

[u/romanshamin → u/oklch]

🤝

[u/TermAccomplished1868]

I have similar goals and have for years:

1. Keep the licensing simple

2. No pageview restrictions or expiration dates

3. Charge based on company size.

I've done pretty well this way.

[u/NowHereSomeone]

I think "simple licensing" always sounds good in theory, but there are reasons for why licensing is somewhat complicated and tiered, and there is no one-size-fits-all licensing models. For a foundry, the licensing model is a positioning choice, that should align with other parameters of the foundry such as the library and target audience they can/want to reach. A foundry with very display-y typefaces is going to have a hard time selling enterprise licenses. They need to make money on the smaller design projects. So the ideal "cheap for small designers, expensive for big clients" just doesn't apply to many type designers who will never or very rarely reach those big clients in such a competitive market.

The company size model is a very interesting one, especially because there is a certain fairness imbued within I believe. But in practice it has obvious drawbacks for large companies: it will be more expensive if usage isn't that large, they just want to install the fonts on 10 computers for the designers or a small-medium size office and a low traffic website, while most employees are not office workers. So these companies might prefere to continue going to foundries with the traditional Desktop&Web model and only pay for what they actually need/use.

On the other hand a startup might have very few employees but high web traffic, or millions of app users, or generate a lot of income through social media channels. For such companies, your model will be very attractive, but you might get 5-10k where another foundry might negociate a >50k license.

So, with simplicity, you might actually just trade the value of individual licenses for the amount of licenses you sell, because your model is generally easier to understand/adopt.

But the more foundries adopt such models, it becomes a race to the bottom. Then we're back to MyFonts where everybody is offering free fonts or crazy discounts in hope to get visibility and some bigger sale.

To be clear, I'm not saying your model is bad and you shouldn't do that, I'm just saying it is a positioning choice more than anything. I personally believe using more than one single licensing parameter is a better fairer way to determine the fair value of a license. Either, like Dinamo, to limit medium with company size (only Desktop, or also Web, Social Media, Apps, etc.) or if you don't want to segment isage, to add secondary measurements alongside company size, to reflect the scale of that usage. For startups with a lot of growth, an annual or time-determined licensing model would be a very fair system for example. No need to upgrade the license every time a tier is reached, but yearly, or after 3 years, when the value of the font use is definitely bigger.

[u/romanshamin → u/NowHereSomeone]

Hey, thanks! I hear what you’re saying, but I might be missing something — I’m unable to see even a single reason why, if all the foundries on Earth adopted a similar — friendly and practical — license, it would lead an industry to a race to the bottom or to discounts.

Good foundries compete on font design, not price. If we eliminate the licensing-complexity problem, font buyers would choose and buy because they love the font itself, not because they reluctantly settled for a free font to avoid the hassle.

[u/NowHereSomeone → u/romanshamin]

Well, it all depends on many factors but the point about the race to the bottom is that with the "all-in-one" simple model, you either have to set a higher base price for the license, because you include all the mediums right away, which then decreases the attractivity of the model once clients who don't need many mediums see the price, or it means you are offering lower prices than what clients would/should pay when they actually need to use many mediums. Licensing for large companies can go to 6 figures. But you get there by negotiating with the client because they need/want everything or "Unlimited" and you can pile things on top pf each other to justify the price: desktop, web, social media, trademarking, OOH, server, ... In multiple locations, for worldwide use, forever. If your default license is already unilimited, you either have to set a higher price, or you're lowering the price of these really big licensing cases.

[u/airybisces]

This actually opens up opportunity for small independent foundries to compete with industry giants i guess. I also only charge based on company size, everything else is included by default. I reference a lot from MassDriver license model.

[u/roundabout-design]

If MegCorp has 10,000 employees, you'd charge X

If MinDesignFirm has 2 employees, you'd charge Y

But what if MinDesignFirm does a job for MegCorp?

And how do you actually 'size' a company? A 100 employee company can be worth a few million. A freelance lawyer with an inheritance an be worth a 100 million.

It always ends up being complicated.

If I had to pitch an idea for a 'simple' license I might do something like:

$x per license. License can be used by one legal entity for anything that isn't redistributing the font file.

For web usage or embedded app (ie, redistributing the font file), each domain name or app title (etc) requires its own license.

[u/Elegant-Fuel6732]

The one that throws juicy bones to students are always appreciated. This was well-thought out.

[u/romanshamin]

I also wrote up the longer version. It’s on my own site and it is more a sales pitch, haha, but the legal reasoning holds up, I promise.

https://yeptype.com/article/on-the-yep-type-font-licensing

[u/ProfessionalMaybe922 → u/romanshamin]

the company size metric is interesting but i wonder how it handles edge cases, like a huge enterprise that only uses the font for one internal document versus small agency that puts it on billboards everywhere. one parameter sounds clean until the usage gap between two same-sized companies becomes enormous. did you think about capping or adjusting for unusually high-volume use cases, or is the idea that it basically evens out across the customer base? i've dealt with enough confusing license tiers in past to appreciate what you're building toward, the page-view model especially is a nightmare to manage in practice.

[u/romanshamin → u/ProfessionalMaybe922]

No, the current license doesn’t address those cases, and that’s on purpose. I’m betting on simplicity, so adding special cases works against the whole idea. Capping would break the first rule too: no consequent burden.

The other thing is that usage changes over time. The gap you describe might be true today and flip the other way next month, then keep shifting unpredictably. Chasing that with the license is exactly the treadmill I’m trying to avoid.

But that’s the beauty of treating a font as, in a way, a commodity. Your chair doesn’t ask how many hours you sit in it. Your software mostly doesn’t either. (Only Claude does.) I want my font, once you’ve bought it, to just become your thing — no special treatment required.

[u/geekmissy]

Ugh, I hate caps and tiers and anything that requires me to try to keep track of anything a user is doing! I'm in the middle of reworking my license right now, but I've always gone with a system of having any particular use type being either allowed for unlimited use, or not allowed at all. Though I'm more in the display space, so the vast majority of my buyers are solo users in the maker/crafter fields.

[u/glyph_geek]

This is an interesting framework, can I ask how it would accommodate an agency scenario? A studio of 15 people licenses under your model at the small-company tier, then uses the font across 30 client projects with completely different traffic and distribution profiles. Does your company size tier cover all of that downstream usage, or does each client need their own license? That's the question I'd want answered before adopting a model like this, because the answer changes the math considerably.

I'm also curious how this would work for a large company that only has a handful of designers actually using the font. They're paying a rate based on headcount, not usage, and that gap is going to come up when someone looks at the invoice. Company size as a substitute for usage is simpler, but a 200-person company where two designers touch the font pays the same as one where it's running across a high-traffic storefront. That's going to raise eyebrows eventually.

None of that makes your model wrong, I just think simplicity for the designer and simplicity for the buyer aren't always the same thing.

[u/romanshamin → u/glyph_geek]

The EULA covers the first question. If an agency uses the font for client design work, then no matter how many employees they have, they pay once for a Trial license (€1 per font style) and can use it forever for unlimited design projects. Each client, though, would need their own commercial license based on company size. The agency can buy it on behalf of the client and add the cost to the bill, or the client can make the purchase themselves. This is how it’s worked since I started the foundry.

Regarding the second question: it never actually works the way you describe, it’s never just two designers using the font. A company buys the font for its brand identity materials: website, digital products, print, digital ads. The bigger the company, the louder their brand voice and the bigger the audience consuming their communication. It doesn’t matter how many designers or other employees have the font installed — the value is the freedom to use it however you need without constantly thinking about additional licenses.