FontRadar

Mads Wildgaard · February 16

Hi all

After going through the threads and recently signing up for FontRadar, I thought it would be good to have some industry-wide discussion on how it can improve and help our license enforcement.

Can we get some opinions from those of you who have used it for years and those who want to sign up but are hesitant?

I believe it to be a great tool for everyone in the industry, but I also see room for improvement.

Nick Cooke · February 16

I signed up over a year ago. I had some good results initially but it has trailed off now which is only to be expected.

Miles Newlyn · February 16

If you're not using it and aren't using an an alternative web spider I think you're mad.
We have a five figure annual return from it.
No improvements necessary for us.

Mads Wildgaard · February 17

Nick and Miles,

Thanks for your comments. Nick, I agree and I expect the results to go a little slower. I imagine they collect a pool as they 'trawl' and that's why a large result comes at first, and then as they continue the cases are less. it's to be expected.

Miles good for you— I'm also happy with the results thus far. Are you satisfied with their handling of customers, especially those who have the correct licensing but may not have their sites linked to the license? Would you be happier if you could contact on your own? I've talked to several other industry people who would've signed on if they could do their own 'policing' while still paying their share to use the service. I must admit I'd be happier too if I could police myself.

John Hudson · February 17

I am actually more interested in using FontRadar to find interesting examples of our typefaces in use than in EULA compliance. I don’t know how I feel about having someone else represent us in what is, after all, a legal situation. I would be happy to pay to use the tool for search purposes without any obligation to use their compliance service.

Mads Wildgaard · February 17

Thank you for your input John, and I agree with your comment on their compliance service.

JoyceKetterer · February 17

Darden Studio doesn't use font raydar though we me may have been one of the first they pitched. I used to be friends with Axle and for a while the pitch deck others saw used our fonts.

I agree with John Hudson. It's really not possible to do font license enforcement at scale on behalf of many font foundries without flattening everything out. A license enforcement is an opportunity to interact with a customer and show them who you are, in a good way. Why would you let a third party acting as a sort of collections agency do it?

Mads Wildgaard · February 18

Joyce, that's a very valid point and it's very much the same feedback I hear from the rest of my contacts. Maybe this would be a good time for the FR team to listen and possibly make it possible again for us to use their service while enforcing it ourselves.

Miles Newlyn · February 18

@Mads Wildgaard We do our own license enforcement, using FontRadar for web crawling and communications management - I understand that this option is no longer available because of misuse by some foundries.

Thomas Phinney · February 18

I can understand why. The revenue-sharing is dependent on both the folks doing the investigations being honest, and revenue-sharing becomes tricky if the foundry team has (understandably and legitimately!) goals that prioritize customer relations more highly above revenue, compared to what a third-party enforcement team might do.

Not to mention that it becomes dependent on the honesty of the foundry as well.

John Hudson · February 19

I’d be happy to sign an agreement to pay a finder’s fee to Font Radar if I were to resolve a license violation I had found with their tool, as well as paying a monthly fee to be able to use the tool for the thing I actually want to use it for, which is finding nice stuff for Fonts in Use, to identify customers for new fonts, and understand usership patterns for different font families. I tested the tool, and am very impressed with how it works, but their business model is the thing I am least interested in using the tool for.

Mads Wildgaard · February 19

@Miles Newlyn, It's of course sad that it's been misused because it's not exactly an astronomical income that this service represents, but more than anything a good way to search and keep an overview of enforcement.

Thomas, yes absolutely it's a tricky situation at any rate. I find it to be a very fundamental difference between how foundries operate and have had issues with it myself.

Thanks John— again, I'm with you on that.

TimAhrens · February 19

To clarify the “misuse” that was mentioned earlier: I believe Myles was referring to cases in which the foundry sells a licence after having discovered a use via Font Radar, or the customer approaching the foundry after being contacted by Font Radar. In these cases, the foundry is obliged to report this as a manual settlement, and pay the share as if the sale had gone through the Font Radar system (this may even lead to a negative balance at the end of the month). Not reporting these licence sales is tempting but it is clearly misuse, of course.

bojjoe · February 19

I have been using it for a good year or more and its helpful in two ways as someone else mentioned: find good uses and potentially infringing licenses (found a whole pharma group unlicensed through there, so yeah sometimes is stuff worth chasing). Overall, it misses a lot of sites, as I had found ones the radar did not, but it's a nice extra thing to have (i'm on the % option with no litigation)

Mads Wildgaard · February 19

Tim, yes that was exactly what I had in mind— this is in-line with the kind of anecdotes @bojjoe mentioned with the pharma group. Thanks for chiming in. Are you using their service as well?

Miles Newlyn · February 19

@TimAhrens exactly right.

Stuart Sandler · February 21

For clarity, what does FR actually discover? Infringing web fonts? Do they have some capability to look at Apps? Marketing Campaigns? Banner advertising? It would seem to me that if the interest was creating tools to perform the same searches as them so each foundry could do its own reach out that it could be worthwhile to define what the tool can and should look for.

Mads Wildgaard · February 21

Apps they find too, but to my knowledge no marketing campaigns or banners. Social Media they investigate too.

Johannes Neumeier · February 27

Just as an anecdotal experience relayed from "user land": I've seen reddit threads where license violators contacted by FontRadar have asked for advice and the overwhelming response from other users was that those enforcement emails are likely a scam and to be ignored and definitely not sanctioned by the foundry.

So, there's that.

Maybe we also need to look in, from the outside, too. I guess it has its place for obvious infringement by juicy clients, but no point in hounding on the average Jane and Joe freelancer and wedding card invitation hobbyist, imo.

TimAhrens · February 27

We have been contacted by several font users who said FontRadar did not seem legitimate to them. Passed this feedback on to FR but improving this does not seem to have high priority for them.

Moritz Kleinsorge · February 27

And often, their emails land in the user's spam folder.

But in general I am totally happy to have signed at Fontradar.

Miles Newlyn · February 28

Any email sent from FontRadar can include a link to a foundry page that legitimizes FontRadar and the email. It's not perfect but it helps.

Mads Wildgaard · February 28

Johannes Neumeier said:

Maybe we also need to look in, from the outside, too. I guess it has its place for obvious infringement by juicy clients, but no point in hounding on the average Jane and Joe freelancer and wedding card invitation hobbyist, imo.

I agree, and it seems they have an option in the "categorise" dialogue which allows you to select it as "not worth pursuing", and I think this is a rather reasonable way to look at it too.

As @TimAhrens points out, among others, is that perhaps the feedback is not going through strongly, and I hope this thread can help a bit. A more refined version of such a service is a help to everyone.

andreirobu · March 1

This, in theory, sounds like a great service, BUT: some red flags for us were sharing the font files for our full catalog and providing our past sales data and existing customer information to determine illegal uses—this is a very delicate matter. Sharing our customer list with a third party also feels like a breach of their privacy and trust. We’d be very interested in using the service if we had control over settling the disputes.

John Hudson · March 1

I wonder what it would cost foundries to collectively develop a tool like the one FontRadar uses or, alternatively, to buy it off FontRadar (who could continue to offer a license enforcement service for any companies or designers who don’t want to spend their time doing that).

Igor Petrovic · March 1

Does FR go after piracy sites?

James Hultquist-Todd · March 2

andreirobu said:

This, in theory, sounds like a great service, BUT: some red flags for us were sharing the font files for our full catalog and providing our past sales data and existing customer information to determine illegal uses—this is a very delicate matter. Sharing our customer list with a third party also feels like a breach of their privacy and trust. We’d be very interested in using the service if we had control over settling the disputes.

You don't need to give them your customer data. We didn't (and we'll never give that data to anyone). If you decline to send them that data, you will have to manually check their findings to make sure no legitimate users are mixed in.

andreirobu · March 3

James Hultquist-Todd said:

andreirobu said:

This, in theory, sounds like a great service, BUT: some red flags for us were sharing the font files for our full catalog and providing our past sales data and existing customer information to determine illegal uses—this is a very delicate matter. Sharing our customer list with a third party also feels like a breach of their privacy and trust. We’d be very interested in using the service if we had control over settling the disputes.

You don't need to give them your customer data. We didn't (and we'll never give that data to anyone). If you decline to send them that data, you will have to manually check their findings to make sure no legitimate users are mixed in.

Thanks for the info. This is what we were presented with so we could not accept. They were only accepting foundries that would go for the full package. It seemed the service is pushing for selling licenses themselves or access our sales through an api in order to receive their percentage. This felt a bit invasive.

While I understand it is a business and they want to make some money too, we would appreciate if there was a way where we keep this data private.

Johannes Neumeier · March 3

@andreirobu Hypothetically, how would you like the service to work? Would you prefer to have a sort of dashboard where you search through hits of your typefaces in general? Or only new finds? Somehow mark found uses as "checked" yourself by comparing to your customer data?

Axel CORJON · March 3

I don’t know if it’s really my place to comment, but I wanted to share my perspective 🙂

A lot of what I’ve read here shows a lack of understanding of who we are and how we operate. I hope I can bring some clarity:

Why don’t we let foundries handle licensing with Font Radar by themselves anymore?

The key word here is anymore. We tried it, and it didn’t work.

Many foundries struggled to find the time to handle this properly, leaving clients waiting for weeks—even with Font Radar’s built-in notifications reminding them to respond. This hurt their reputation. They also needed significant help investigating cases, estimating infringements, handling users, and dealing with legal matters. That was expected when we launched this service, but not to this extent.

What I didn’t expect, however, was foundries hiding settlements they secured thanks to Font Radar. So yes, we terminated this service, keeping only those who were previously actively engaged and adhered to our contract (along with a few really small ones, in hopes that it could help them find cases now and then)

Why don’t we offer it as a subscription?

It’s just not feasible. The scale at which we operate involves massive hosting costs—we scan millions of websites and hundreds of mobile apps every day. Each case is enriched with multiple (expensive) third-party services. We also run automatic cross-referencing with foundries’ license databases to avoid mistakenly contacting legitimate clients.

Switching to a subscription model would kill the project quickly. Our tool simply isn’t built for that. Making it subscription-based would require an extremely high price that most foundries wouldn’t be able to afford. I'd rather provide a service that’s accessible to all foundries, regardless of their size or financial capacity.

Why do we ask for foundries’ license databases? / Is my data secure?

First, it’s not mandatory. As you’re probably aware (or experiencing firsthand), third-party distributors don’t share their license databases, and many foundries lack a consistent, clean database. We can operate without it—the only risk is accidentally contacting legitimate users (who, by the way, usually don’t mind).

As for data security: our ToS strictly limit what we can do with the data we gather or that is shared with us. Essentially, we can only use it for license verification—nothing else. Our data is stored in Europe and protected under GDPR regulations, which we fully comply with.

On the other hand, we share everything with foundries—details, billing, licensing information—to help them build a coherent license database. If a foundry already has one, we even offer API integrations to pull Font Radar transactions into their system.

I encourage you to read the contracts you have with third-party services and see if you get the same level of transparency.

"You're just acting as a collection agency and flattening everything out"

We actualy work closely with each foundry to provide a customized experience.

When a foundry joins us, we ask them a series of questions to understand how they want us to operate—what licensing system they have in place, who we should (or shouldn’t) contact, etc. Our initial outreach emails are also based on templates that we ask foundries to customize, ensuring the tone aligns with their brand. Foundries are also able to monitor every emails we send and let us know is they want us to change anything.

During the first few weeks, we send follow-up questions about new cases to better understand them. Each foundry has a dedicated account manager (they can also reach out to me anytime) who gradually becomes familiar with their approach.

Essentially, we provide a free employee, trained in font licensing (by me). You’ll need to give them some initial guidance, but after that, they’ll operate within your framework. And if adjustments are needed later, we’re flexible. Our team has deep expertise in font licensing, with thousands of successfully settled cases.

Also, in case you’re wondering—our entire team is in-house, based in Paris, France, and fluent in English (and other languages).

"Why don’t we just build it ourself or buy it off?"

To give you an idea of the scale of this project: we’re a team of 16. Half of us specialize in font licensing, while the rest are developers, product managers, and myself. Since 2021, we’ve helped dozens of foundries detect and handle font license infringements.

Every day, we scan millions of websites and hundreds of mobile apps, collect proof, and integrate with multiple third-party services to enrich each case (e.g., traffic estimates, company size and revenue, relevant contact emails, number of downloads, etc.). We also compare font files against our in-house font matching algorithm (https://fonts.ninja/extension-demo/1)

Our team investigates (both automatically and manually) hundreds of websites and apps daily. This isn’t something you can just buy off the shelf—it requires a dedicated team of developers to maintain. It’s far more than a simple Python crawler running on a local machine 😉

That said, I sincerely encourage you to take font licensing enforcement seriously. If I remember correctly, Joyce used to rely on a basic crawling service (and Fonts Ninja for confirmation). While that’s nowhere near as accurate or extensive as what we offer (in terms of both scanning capabilities and expert support), it’s a start. Maybe it will work for you, or maybe you’ll realize how much time and effort it takes and consider Font Radar. Either way, I fully support any initiative that helps raise awareness about font licensing 🙂 (I’ve written several articles on this topic, advocate for it whenever I can, and even speak at conferences about it).

By the way, if you need advice, feel free to reach out. With thousands of cases handled and multiple foundries relying on my expertise weekly for EULAs, legal considerations, licensing models, pricing strategies, etc., I’d be happy to help.

I’ve been passionate about design and typography for the past 20 years. I’ve won countless graphic design awards and have been running Fonts Ninja (both as a browser extension and now a font discovery platform) for free for the past ten years. My goal has always been to build tools that benefit the design community—both graphic designers and type designers—while staying true to my values of transparency and honesty.

I hope that resonates with some of you. If not—well, that’s life 🙂

Wishing you all the best! You can reach me at axel [at] fonts.ninja if you’d like to discuss anything.

Thomas Phinney · March 3

> I’ve written several articles on this topic, advocate for it whenever I can, and even speak at conferences about it

Can you provide links to some of those things? I am sure that it would be interesting to see more about your perspective.

Also, thank you for providing so much detail on the foundry-specific customization you provide in your services.

FontRadar

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