[akshayn]

They'd need to continue paying for their font license.

"The biggest factor is that we have recurring costs: the sync server and the licensing fees for Ideal Sans, Vesper’s typeface."

They'd need to continue paying for their font license.

[jgruber]

I shouldn't have included the font licensing fee (and in fact have since edited the article to remove it). Our annual server fees are 15-20x the cost of the font license.

What I was thinking about was opening sourcing the app. If we do that, we'll have to replace Ideal Sans with another font. The obvious choice would be iOS's system font.

[phowat]

That's hardly a showstopper. They could easily remove the proprietary font when open sourcing. I doubt the heavy users of this app are using solely because the font is beautiful.

[mox1]

The font is not cheap either*. When you can barely get people to pay $0.99 for a industry leading app, how on earth can you justify paying so much $$ for a font. I mean switch to the closest google / open source version and call it good enough.

[1] http://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview/

[timdierks]

It's $300/year from what I can see. Not free, but if you think it's a valuable part of your design, a small cost, unless you just don't have a viable business in the first place.

[jsprogrammer]

Or switch to a free font.