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.
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.