MyFonts' pricing guidelines - do you agree?

ValKalinicValKalinic Posts: 49
edited August 2019 in Type Business
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.
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Comments

  • Chris LozosChris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    There is much more work in adding Greek or Cyrillic. My time has to count for something.

  • James PuckettJames Puckett Posts: 1,969
    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.
  • Vasil StanevVasil Stanev Posts: 759
    edited August 2019
    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 StanevVasil Stanev Posts: 759
    edited August 2019
    P.S. Deco fonts can build families, but interpolating them is much more difficult, so in that special case I would price them higher.
  • Huh, nothing about the 75%-80% discounts they encourage.
  • Mark SimonsonMark Simonson Posts: 1,652
    edited August 2019
    @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.
  • @Mark Simonson maybe.  I really don't know what I'd do had we not been expanding a 10 year old best seller.
  • @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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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