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.
Comments
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.
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.
@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.
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.