Tier Pricing

Stuart Sandler

As I was onboarding some new fonts recently, it occurred to many that distributors have gone away from custom tiers and related pricing. For example, one only needs to enter the default font family price and the base individual font style pricing and that's that.

All other multipliers for end users and special licenses (app, web, etc) seem to be automatically calculated based on the distributors formula.

While I do appreciate the time savings, it makes me wonder if it harms the consistency of my pricing across all distributors. Also, I do see value in being able to offering micro tiers for single users, two users, etc rather than just the base tier be for Up to 5 users.

Wasn't sure if I was alone in my nostalgia for custom tiers or if font buyers now expect the standard tiers in predictable chunks.

JoyceKetterer

I think it depends a lot on the specific formula.  In theory, I do think ideally that all the pricing should have some relationship to each other so they prices aren't perceived by the customer is arbitrary.

That said, I think there's a fundamental problem in practice.  To give myself as an example, I think most font foundries have a confusing number of kinds of licensing (broadcast, social media, etc) which then works out to the individual items being less than I'd want for my sales.   To be clear, I find that the "all in price" for my licensing is similar to other indie foundries but that we're allocating those costs differently. Therefore, if I was with a reseller doing this I'd really suffer because I flat out would have fewer line items.  I'm sure there are others at the other end of the spectrum.  Also, it could either penalise or encourage more interpolated weights than serve than font, which could be a problem.

In theory I think it would be possible for a reseller to apply formulas to a base rate and be doing you a service.   It seems like every reseller has their own little customer base and I don't think it would be bad if your licenses are going for different rates at different places.  Thier knowledge of their clients is why you're with them, right?

That is, as long as the license documents are the same.  Different documents are different resellers is a major problem.

Christopher Slye

Joyce, are you saying you think it’s a problem for a foundry’s fonts to be sold under different EULAs at different distributors?

JoyceKetterer

Christopher, I'm not a lawyer so speaking purely from a business perspective, yes.  The minimum is that it sows customer confusion.  The worst case is that it can cause serious logistical problems with trying to enforce a license.  That goes, of course, for licenses under different EULA under any circumstances (including when the foundry changes their EULA). But sometimes it's a calculated risk one has to take.