How to price your fonts.

As we’ll describe in more detail in this article, many factors impact pricing: category, OpenType features, character set, licensing terms, foundry reputation, and more. Keep reading and we’ll delve into these factors as well as a variety of pricing strategies to help you choose the optimal prices for your fonts.

Thinking like a business

For many type designers, pricing their typefaces is an emotional decision as much as an economic one. They may feel that a relatively high price expresses appreciation for their work, while low or discounted prices degrade it. However, we’d encourage designers to consider the economic reality above all else when making pricing decisions.

Foundries are often made up mostly of highly creative thinkers who prioritize honing their craft over the single-minded pursuit of profit. When you’re designing a font, you can (and should!) think like a creative. But when you reach the stage of pricing your lovingly crafted font, you’ve got to start thinking more like a businessperson.

To help you do that, we’ll take some time to highlight which attributes of fonts can significantly influence pricing decisions.

Factors that influence font pricing

Numerous variables can contribute to font pricing decisions, including:

• OpenType features (i.e., variable fonts): Extensive OpenType features and other advanced typographic capabilities enhance fonts’ functionality and versatility, justifying a higher price point.
• Character set: Fonts with a wide range of characters and symbols as well as extensive language support are infinitely more useful for design projects with global audiences.
• Cost and overhead: A font’s price should accurately reflect the financial investments required to create and maintain it.
• Quality and craftsmanship: Fonts that demonstrate superior design and attention to detail—reflecting the high skill level, extensive experience, and intensive effort of those who designed them—typically cost more.
• Market demand: Customers may be willing to pay more for fonts that align with popular design trends or that fulfill niche requirements that are met by few existing fonts.
• Target customers: Fonts that appeal to industries with higher purchasing power (e.g., tech) or with specialized typographic needs can be priced higher thanks to their ability to meet their customers’ unique requirements.
• Foundry reputation: Established foundries with a reputation for producing high-quality fonts can charge more for their work than up-and-coming, little-known foundries.
• Foundry updates and support: Ongoing updates, comprehensive support, and timely bug fixes for a font justify a higher purchase price.

The extensive list above doesn’t even include all the factors that could potentially influence a font pricing decision. Because this is such a complex choice, the next section will delve into more detailed advice to help you optimize pricing for your fonts.

Font pricing strategies

The most common font pricing models

Font pricing models vary across the industry:

• Individual font sales: Fonts can be sold and licensed on a per-font basis, with customers purchasing the rights to use a specific font or fonts for their personal or commercial projects.
• Font family sales: Foundries may also sell collections of related fonts that are grouped by family category but have a variety of attributes like weights and styles.
• Subscription-based access to font libraries: Customers pay periodic fees to gain access to a wide selection of fonts, rather than having to purchase individual fonts or specific font families. We’ll elaborate on the benefits of a subscription-based font pricing model later in this article.

Choose your market niche

Pricing is often a question of choosing your niche in the market. In general, there are two paths you can take when it comes to your pricing strategy:

1. Lower pricing to appeal to a larger pool of customers: Like many foundries, you may try to achieve success by appealing to a broader customer base with lower pricing that maximizes the number of potential customers that can afford your fonts. This strategy means you see online font sales as a volume business: the more people that purchase your font, the more places it’s used and the more popular it becomes, creating further demand for your fonts and increasing your foundry’s brand recognition. However, this strategy can also prove risky—lowering your prices to be more competitive can quickly become a race to the bottom.
2. Higher pricing to establish a high-end type brand: Instead of pricing your fonts lower to be more competitive, consider selling your fonts at a higher price. This increases your profit per unit sold, potentially supercharging your profit margins. If you raise your prices, it’s also possible that the number of units sold could decrease. However, taking the initial risk of higher pricing could pay dividends by helping you establish a high-end, well-known luxury brand, which increases your chances of snagging substantial offline deals, licenses, and custom projects.

In the next section, we’ll elaborate on what makes path #2 a more financially sustainable approach to pricing for many foundries.

Increasing font pricing for long-term financial viability

As we’ve already described, higher font prices can help your foundry business not only to sustain itself, but also to grow and gain wider recognition among higher-paying customers. 

Premium font pricing generates higher revenue with every sale, providing you with the funds needed to invest in developing and expanding your foundry’s font library. These funds can also make space for greater creativity and innovation at your foundry, allowing you to explore new typographic trends. With a wider range of high-quality fonts comes even more customers—and ideally, this becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

Image isn’t everything when it comes to font pricing, but it’s by no means insignificant. Premium pricing contributes to customers’ impression that your fonts are actually worth more. This attracts font purchasers in search of top-quality typography, further enhancing your foundry’s reputation over time. You may also find that a higher pricing structure projects an image of your foundry as a reputable, desirable partner for collaborations with major industry players like prominent design agencies.

Higher font prices also allow you to invest more into font development and support. Well-funded customer service teams have the resources to provide timely, top-notch assistance in response to customer inquiries. A reputation for great customer service leads to strong customer loyalty, which fuels long-term business growth.

Increasing your font pricing sets your foundry up for sustainable growth, enhances its market position, and fosters creativity and innovation. Overall, it’s a more profitable strategy than lowering your prices to compete with foundries selling cheaper fonts—an approach that’s effectively a race to the bottom.

Benefits of font subscriptions

A font subscription model offers foundries some key advantages. In contrast to one-off font purchases, subscriptions enable foundries to cultivate deeper, more enduring relationships with designers and organizations. With time, this can lead to even more exciting opportunities for collaboration.

Because subscribers make recurring payments on a regular basis, font subscriptions also provide foundries with a reliable, predictable revenue stream. This steady revenue allows foundries to more comfortably sustain their current operations and more effectively plan for the future.

For customers

Not only is a subscription-based font pricing model beneficial for foundries, it’s also more appealing to customers for several major reasons:

• It enables long-term savings: Customers can purchase and license fonts individually if they only need them occasionally or for personal use. But if they require the flexibility to engage in unlimited prototyping or to use a variety of different fonts throughout the year, purchasing fonts individually is often costlier and is much more challenging to manage—so much so that customers may shy away from purchasing fonts in general and instead turn to free fonts or more dubious methods. Thanks to its regularity, a font subscription also facilitates budget planning and regulates annual expenses. This increases the number of potential customers who can afford to purchase fonts.
• It allows them more room for experimentation: Buying fonts individually forces customers to purchase a desktop license for every font they test, whether or not they decide to deploy that font into production. Once they select a font for commercial use, they’ll also need to purchase additional licenses and keep track of which kinds of licenses they have for each font. A font subscription with an all-inclusive desktop license gives creatives room to experiment with an entire font library—literally thousands of different fonts.
• It simplifies their design workflow: Font subscriptions that come with several pre-negotiated licenses for web, app, and other commercial distribution (as a Monotype Fonts subscription does) simplify customers’ workflow from the initial design phase to the final deployment stage.
• It fosters teamwork and brand consistency: User-friendly app and web interfaces make it easy for subscribers to track, manage, and share fonts, facilitating teamwork and brand consistency throughout an organization.

Considering this array of benefits, it’s no wonder that consumer trends point to an increasing preference for font subscriptions over individual font purchases.

Communicating the value of fonts to customers

Fonts have enormous marketing value for businesses, especially when it comes to crafting a memorable and distinctive brand aesthetic. To sell your fonts, foundries should remind customers of that value. Emphasize the role of fonts in establishing the visual identity of a brand or a particular design project. The right font can evoke everything from authority to creativity, and from elegance to playfulness.

Remind your customers: Fonts are a cornerstone of visual communication, so truly well-crafted fonts are a worthwhile investment.

Here are some examples of specific strategies to fuel font sales:

• Testimonials: Leverage positive feedback from satisfied customers to showcase the quality of your fonts and instill trust in potential buyers.
• Case studies that illustrate your fonts’ impact: Monotype shares case studies of our individual fonts and brand partnerships to highlight the concrete ways that typography can supercharge marketing efforts.

Educational content that highlights your foundry’s expertise: Font-related educational content like Monotype’s demonstrates your foundry’s credibility as an industry authority.

Conclusion: our biggest competitor is the free font market

Since the start of the digital era, computer and software companies have inadvertently shaped how the public views the value of fonts. Companies bundled hefty packs of professional fonts with their design apps and devices, giving everyday consumers the impression that fonts should be free by default. 

Of course, free fonts with open source licenses are abundant, and they’re higher quality and more accessible than ever before. In fact, 75% of respondents to our most recent Font Purchasing Habits Survey report that at some point in the past, they have opted to use a free font for a new project instead of buying a font.

Today, as a community of people who earn our living selling type, our biggest collective competition isn’t other designers selling fonts—it’s the free font market. Only together can we expand the pool of customers who recognize the value of high-quality fonts and continue paying to license them.