Dalton Maag Cheap Licenses and Free Full Trials

I don't see how this is "converging with the low-end".
It's just a marketing strategy that seems to work because blogs have picked up on it.

We at fatype have been offering free trials as well. swisstypefaces deserve the credit for coming up with that (AFAIK). I think it's a great idea, but it also depends on the foundry, its market, its strategy and its fonts. There is not one strategy that will work for everybody.

The big move there is offering full free trials.
But they are right, many graphic designers already get full trial fonts from their friends anyway.

The rest doesn't sound particularly special. Nor cheap (which is good).
15£ is for one user. A desktop font for 3 users (most foundries offer 3-5 users as default) costs 36£ or 58$.

Dropping traffic stats for webfonts is simpler but annual licensing is not. A bakery that wants to run its website for 5 years will end up paying more with that model than with a perpetual license based on traffic (plus the hassle or renewal). So it mostly profits the biggest clients, which is where the money's at. That sounds like a loss to me. Why should a small client pay the same as a big one for webfonts, but a lot less for desktop?

PS: I've used my twitter handle as username. Open enough I think. If not please delete my account. I don't see why people should find industry forum posts when they google my name.

Yeah, not sure why this is being described as cheap. Tons of respected foundries are cheaper for anything but their single computer licenses. We’re cheaper on pretty much any metric other than that. We chose our price points to support smaller studios and young designers in chosing our typefaces, but to still capture enough value from larger customers. I also I really dislike recurring billing from taking over industries, so our licenses are perpetual.

I think their trial fonts are definitely a step in the right direction though. Font piracy is a reality and anybody who thinks they can somehow relieve their own company of that by cracking down on it harder than others is silly. We optimize for our paying customers, and the last few years have shown that ease of use and customer-friendly solutions win out. If you’re not H&Co and can’t invest hundreds of thousands into a custom solution, it’s just not worth it to even try.

And yes, it’s weird that mostly Swiss foundries seem to do trials. I agree with Yassin that Swiss Typefaces deserves credit for coming up with the trial fonts model.

…most of it fall somewhere between laziness and negligence.

Dalton Maag has addressed that by renaming of the the trial fonts with the prefix “Trial”. I think this is a smart strategy; it reminds designers to buy a license regardless of where they acquired the trial fonts. It also allows art directions and print production staff in larger firms to catch the interns and junior designers using fonts the firm didn’t pay for.

Lots of Dafonters have been using this model for years...

It seems like most Goo-fonters claim this is their business model entirely.

Quick, somebody trademark the font name Trial and you'll own it all!

>troll food<

I think I banned Yassin accidentally. There’s been a steady stream of new spambots lately and I’ve had to ban a lot of accounts.

Slowly! He had full info in his account earlier when I looked, website, company, links. Everyone can find out who he is. The rule to use your full real name as a must got loosened several months ago. If it’s okay for others, why not for Yassin, just because you might not have heard of him yet.

Thank you for the un-ban. Sorry to continue the off-topic.
I think I raised a reasonable reason for why I don't want to participate with my real full name. I understand the desire to avoid anonymous trolls, on the other hand anonymity on the internet allows people to express their real ideas freely, without fear of repercussions from their bosses, clients, etc. It is not as simple for everyone to "stand by your comments", it really depends your situation. An employee from corporation-foundry X might refrain from posting here because it might have negative impact on his career. Therefore this policy could prevent the expression of other point of views.

Anyway, this has been discussed before and what I think was a reasonable solution such as generic Names for non-members – or invisible messages to non-members – have been dismissed, meaning the position for real names is firm. I respect that and certainly don't expect any special treatment.
Feel free to ban me again then
Best,
Y

Thierry had already convinced me at Typecon, but I was holding off on a site redesign. Dalton Maag lit a fire under my ass to just go ahead and implement the trials instead of waiting. Today I went ahead and added trial fonts to the Dunwich Type site (http://dunwichtype.com/free-trial-fonts).