versefediJapanese devs face font licensing dilemma as leading provider increases annual plan price from $380 to $20,000+
Eager EagleI really don’t get this strategy, it sounds like “we’d rather make $0 than $380” to me, unless they’re really the only font out there and paying a designer for 6 months still can’t get the job done.
If even one company opts to keep paying the license, that makes up for over 50 cancellations. They need less than 1/50 of their current licensees to continue paying to break even.
It’s shitty, but it’s basically a company taking themselves out of an entry-level market to extract more money from the types of clients where $20,500 is a rounding error.
bizarrolandAlso, there’s probably a lot of money to be made in being a font hunter for these companies. You find a company that has infringed on the font holder’s rights. You bring that information to them. You get permission to sue on their behalf and then reap the rewards. And most companies will fork out the $20,000 rather than spend $50 or $100,000 on Litigation, and the font rights holder will catch the $20,000 on the year after for free
I’d argue that the ratio needs to be much higher than 1/50 to compensate for the increase in risk. It’s a lot easier to lose a handful of customers than hundreds. And this increase doesn’t look good at all for the customers that stay.
Fonts cannot be easily removed or replaced. So you pay their extortion or they sue you and get it anyway. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They are the comic villain kind of evil.
to be fair, anyone using a font for branding that requires an annual subscription, put themselves in that spot. I think the reasons would be technical in this case. But they’re basically betting that $20k/y in a couple years couldn’t pay for the efforts to replace it, and I think that’s really risky.
Monotype is functionally an international monopoly. More than Luxottica, but for many of the same reasons. If the small selection of open source fonts don’t do what a company needs, then their only option other than Monotype is to have a font created. Monotype owns almost everything font related. Companies, fonts, everything.