Paying for a cufon license to use fonts on a website is something I have never quite understood or accepted. Up until now however the amounts of money have been relatively small and due to this I have just grumbled about it and ultimately paid for it. I was about to go through this process again but it didn’t seem as straightforward as usual and rather than handing over credit card details for a minimal charge I was asked for the website URL and amount of anticipated traffic. I was of course, bewildered by this and questioned why this would be applicable when the fonts are not hosted for us? Surely when buying a font it shouldn’t matter, if it was for something such as a brochure or leaflet the price would not be dependent on the amount of brochures produced!

I was reluctant to provide any information as there are a number of free fonts out there that we can use but was curious as to the charges and after a game of email tennis, the font foundry final responded with the pricing model below…

10,000 visitors a month = £176.00 Plus VAT *
100,000 visitors a month = £700.00 Plus VAT *
1,000,000 visitors a month = £1464.00 Plus VAT*

The pricing will fluctuate depending on the basic cost of the font
(*All prices subject to our terms and conditions as detailed below)

I was absolutely shocked at the fluctuation in price and also a little worried that this might need to be something that is considered at the beginning of a web development project.

Fortunately, there are remedies to this situation out there. Typekit’s subscription based services offers access to a library of hosted fonts sourced from various foundries and the recent announcement of Google’s own font directory gives free access to a limited number of fonts that will hopefully grow with time. Other available services are Font Squirrel’s library of commercially free to use fonts and FontSpring’s @font-face ready collection that are a one-time purchase with unlimited usage.

I know from now on, when at the design phase of a project I will be checking if the font is free or a reasonable cost. As an agency, we don’t want to end up showing a client an amazing design and font if we are going to end up paying in excess of £1500 for it!