MyFonts' pricing guidelines - do you agree?

ValKalinic

Their article "Common prices for single styles" states:

$10 – $19

This price range typically works for display fonts like scripts, casual fonts, or other highly decorative and specific faces. It brings your font collection within reach of beginner graphic designers, students, or hobbyist users who feel they cannot afford professional pricing. Highly specific font designs (like historical fonts, seasonal fonts, fonts that are more abstract or harder to read, fonts that can only be used at large sizes, fonts for very specific use cases like monograms) in general have a smaller market to begin with. Because of the smaller potential customer base, it’s very important to make sure your prices for these kinds of fonts are accessible and attractive to this audience. 

$20 – $30

This is a common price range for professional fonts that hope to attract professionals as well as hobbyists. Many sans, serif, and other text font families with multiple weights see success with this price point. At this price, a user would expect to have characters beyond MyFonts’ minimum recommended character set. 

$35 – $59

This price range is common for professional fonts.

• Sophisticated script and display fonts with a large number of OpenType features, such as ligatures, alternates, swash characters — often amounting to between 1,000 and 2,000 glyphs.
• Professional text fonts may have a high glyph count because they contain small caps, various numeral styles, and ample language coverage. In fact, one Pro font in OpenType format may contain the contents of up to five fonts in the old formats (PS Type1 or the old TrueType fonts): they had extra fonts for small caps, Central-European, Greek, Cyrillic, swashes and special numeral styles

Do you agree with these?
To me it seems to lean on the expensive side for fonts from small, new, and independent foundries. Wouldn't even their "mid price" of $25 be just slightly too much to charge for a single style from an unknown foundry (even with an extensive character map and OpenType features included)? 

I'm asking to get some more perspective from others, I have no experience with pricing (an independent foundry) style above their "10 to 19 $" bracket - and they state that's appropriate for "scripts, casual fonts, or other highly decorative and specific faces".

At the same time, there is a clear trend of people pricing families intentionally too high, in a way that will allow steep discounts in the future, inflating average default prices on the site.

Ray Larabie

With deco fonts (all caps decorative), I go down to $8 if it's a bit too far-out for general use. A more useful, versatile deco font is $14 max. For larger families $11 each and for deco superfamilies (rare) $9 each. My price cap for single fonts is $22. $19 if it's part of a family. $16 if it's part of a superfamily.

I call layers that aren't very useful on their own, breadcrumbs and set those to $3. For example: the snow layer font on a snow covered display typeface. The customer requires the base font so I try to make sure the total after purchasing the layers is about the same price as non-layered deco typeface.

I don't like the suggestion that Greek and Cyrillic should increase the price. Supporting more languages widens the appeal but shouldn't cost more since I think the customer is most likely using it for one language. Should Greek type designers be charging more for supporting English? Nope, I don't like it.

Including lots of alternate characters should lower the price The type designer's lack of decisiveness end up causing more work for the customer. Maybe I'm kidding about that last part.

Chris Lozos

There is much more work in adding Greek or Cyrillic. My time has to count for something.

James Puckett

I’ve never noticed a difference in my prices and sales. I recently set everything at $30 and I’m just leaving it that way.

Mark Simonson

My time has to count for something.

If you're in the retail font market, you're not being paid by the hour. The way to think about adding things like Greek and Cyrillic is that it increases the appeal and expands the potential market for your font, meaning more sales potential and therefore more income, justifying the time spent.

Assuming there is a market for your font. If you make a font nobody wants, adding Greek and Cyrillic won't help. There is always the risk that any time you spend on a font will never count for anything (except experience). Making fonts that people want is the tricky part. It's not about how much time you spent.

Thomas Phinney

The MyFonts guidelines are giving you a pretty accurate picture of what typical pricing is like, in general, in the marketplace. Up to you if you want to follow that.

Vasil Stanev

I find the prices appropriate considering that deco fonts don't generally belong to a bigger family. The range for pro fonts is very good IMPO, because the whole family can include many members that make up for discounts. In the end, it is the market that decides what good or service is paid what. I would like to be paid thousands of dollars for single font like I'm told it was in the 80s, but those days are long gone, for better or worse. It is also the market in Greece and countries that use Cyrillic that determines, for me, if those sets should be included. Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no.

Vasil Stanev

P.S. Deco fonts can build families, but interpolating them is much more difficult, so in that special case I would price them higher.

JoyceKetterer

@Mark Simonson I think there's a difference between saying "my time has to count for something" and suggesting you're paid by the hour.  I too feel like the more scripts a font supports the more it is reasonable to charge.  I might not have phrased it as being about time, but effort is time, right?

@Chris Lozos This is why I still can't bring myself to offer a single unified build of Omnes with the Cyrillic and Arabic (and soon Greek) we added in the last year.  I know that most of our customers only want Latin support and could be scared away if we added the support and increased the price.  We have a few global customers who use Omnes to whom I offered the additional scripts for free and even they don't use it!  But, the customers for whom these additional scripts matter are happy to pay more and largely don't seem to mind it shipping as a separate file.

Ralph Smith

Huh, nothing about the 75%-80% discounts they encourage.

Mark Simonson

@JoyceKetterer It's easier for me to have one version of my font, and simpler for the customer as well.

That said, it really depends on the script. Greek and Cyrillic are close enough to Latin that it's not like making a completely new font. Other scripts, like Arabic or CJK, I don't think I would simply add to the character set of my standard version. They would probably be separate releases.

JoyceKetterer

@Mark Simonson maybe.  I really don't know what I'd do had we not been expanding a 10 year old best seller.

John Hudson

Our approach for multiscript typefaces is to offer both complete fonts and individual script subset fonts. The customers who need multiple scripts tend to be specialist publishers, companies operating in global markets, or software companies looking for embedding licenses. Individual users are more likely to need only one script.

Claudio Piccinini

JoyceKetterer said:

@Chris Lozos This is why I still can't bring myself to offer a single unified build of Omnes with the Cyrillic and Arabic (and soon Greek) we added in the last year.  I know that most of our customers only want Latin support and could be scared away if we added the support and increased the price.  We have a few global customers who use Omnes to whom I offered the additional scripts for free and even they don't use it!  But, the customers for whom these additional scripts matter are happy to pay more and largely don't seem to mind it shipping as a separate file.

Absolutely. And it makes sense, IMO.

Claudio Piccinini

John Hudson said:

Our approach for multiscript typefaces is to offer both complete fonts and individual script subset fonts. The customers who need multiple scripts tend to be specialist publishers, companies operating in global markets, or software companies looking for embedding licenses. Individual users are more likely to need only one script.

That is a very good strategy too. Just differentiating a bit the family name will help.

Claudio Piccinini

As for pricing: I would say it should really depend on the actual quality of the work, paired with its intended/prospected audience. If a display typeface is finely crafted, it could be licensed for more, but the same goes for a running text typeface.