Is it possible to customize font price for different areas? (higher internationally, lower locally)

Khai Quang Nguyen

Okay, so we are planning to sell our fonts under our foundry's website to users in our country only and distribute fonts to font marketplaces for international users. But we encounter some troubles trying to do so.

First, we want to set the price on our website in our country's currency rate and sell fonts exclusively for our country's users. The reasons are that our currency's exchange rate is very unfavorable to the US dollar, which is mostly used in font marketplaces. And the average actual price and perceived price for fonts in the domestic market are significantly lower. Most importantly, we want to make quality fonts available for users here by localizing the price.

At the same time, we wish to sell fonts through font marketplaces for international users as well (under US dollar). And the anticipated price is higher than that of our website (after converting the currency rates). Our biggest concern lies here: most of the marketplaces do not accept fonts submitted by foundry set at a higher price than that of other channels. But they do not specify our case, at least publicly.

Basically, we intend to differentiate prices to encourage domestic users to practice legal font purchase and use (one of the reasons for the unethical use is that they can not afford fonts sold in US dollars) and sustain our business at the same time. We do not intend to create unfair price competition and will make our best effort to limit purchases on our website to domestic users only.

So, do font marketplaces normally allow us to do what we wish? Thanks so so much.

JoyceKetterer

@John Hudson may have some insights.  I know he has a font with indigenous support which he wanted to license for free to indigenous readers and charge for others.  It's a slightly different case but close enough that he could have some useful information.

Khai Quang Nguyen

Thanks a lot @JoyceKetterer for tagging him. Luckily, i did tweet about this and he replied me already. Here's the thread: 

https://twitter.com/quangkhai_ngn/status/1590632066995343362

Paul Hanslow

My only suggestion is you link the buying process to 'local' credit cards or accounts if possible. It's too easy to get on a VPN, access your countries location and obtain the discount. That's assuming this bothers you. I'm a type designer, not a back end programmer, so I don't know if the above process is possible but it's worth considering.

John Hudson

For indigenous language fonts, we’ve ended up making separate versions of the fonts, so that we can offer the IL versions on a pay–what–you–want basis (which can be free) as a separate product. It exposes us a bit, because although we can limit the diacritic set to specific languages and hence disable the fonts for a lot of European languages, they’re still useable for most English text, so someone could easily abuse the system. We did look at trying to write a separate license agreement linked to language use, but it turned out to be too complicated and seemed to confuse the people whom we asked for feedback.

Khai Quang Nguyen

Paul Hanslow said:

My only suggestion is you link the buying process to 'local' credit cards or accounts if possible. It's too easy to get on a VPN, access your countries location and obtain the discount. That's assuming this bothers you. I'm a type designer, not a back end programmer, so I don't know if the above process is possible but it's worth considering.

Your suggestion makes perfect sense! We are working on what you recommend. Thank you so much.

Khai Quang Nguyen

John Hudson said:

For indigenous language fonts, we’ve ended up making separate versions of the fonts, so that we can offer the IL versions on a pay–what–you–want basis (which can be free) as a separate product. It exposes us a bit, because although we can limit the diacritic set to specific languages and hence disable the fonts for a lot of European languages, they’re still useable for most English text, so someone could easily abuse the system. We did look at trying to write a separate license agreement linked to language use, but it turned out to be too complicated and seemed to confuse the people whom we asked for feedback.

Thank you for such great insights. By what you're saying, are the IL versions of a font (in our case Vietnamese-supported font for local users only) considered by font marketplaces as a different product (to the international version which we intend to support various languages), and the "no higher price compared to other channels" rule is not applied? 

John Hudson

In the IL case, they are literally different products—i.e. different fonts—, and not something we make available to distributors and resellers. They’re not directly parallel to what you are trying to do, but Joyce mentioned them, so I thought I would explain where we ended up after considering various options.

Khai Quang Nguyen

Oh now I get the full picture. Many thanks for your explanation.

JoyceKetterer

@Khai Quang Nguyen Can your posted price match that of the reseller but you have a button on your website to apply for a discount?  You could then grant a discount to anyone who can prove they are in country.  This would add some friction and maybe scare away some customers, but it would probably satisfy the resellers.  It's less than ideal but sometimes the only solution is a creative solution.  If you'd like to see how this kind of discount works, feel free to apply for a student discount on my website.  (https://www.dardenstudio.com/contact)

Matthew Smith

While this doesn’t answer your question(s), it might be relevant to add:
Flavia Zimbardi offer a 30% discount for customer from less advanced economies.
https://flaviazim.com/licenses#discounts-for-customers-from-less-advanced-economies

John Butler

I notice that the Vietnamese alphabet does not include the letters f, j, w, or z, except for foreign words. Removing them for Vietnamese pricing might be too extreme, but removing their ligatures perhaps less so. Or including somehow less harmonious versions of those glyphs with the local-priced font versions.

JoyceKetterer

I've started to notice some higher end women's wear companies discount their posted rates by nearly half if you're on their mailing list.  I don't even mean a club and a code, it's just a simple discount when you use the link from the email.  I think it has to be that all the  direct to consumer brands are having an effect.  The resellers no long have the power to require that the prices be the same for direct sales and resale.  The posted prices are still the same, but the effective price is passing along the wholesale price to the consumer.  Not sure how long it will take that mentality to get to fonts, but it's still interesting.