[rntz]

This situation is beginning to improve if you know where to look. There are several typeface designers who offer both low prices and reasonable licensing terms for their fonts; for instance, David Jonathan Ross (https://djr.com/) has a "Font of the Month Club" that gives you one font per month at $6/month; even without membership you can get previous club fonts for $24; and the licensing terms are plain english. Matthew Butterick's fonts cost more ($120 for a full typeface; mbtype.com) but have a very reasonable plain-English license.

That said, usage tiers (where you must pay more if your website gets a certain # of views/month) seem ubiquitous. I think these are ok - big websites can afford to pay more, and I wouldn't be surprised if a disproportionate amount of a typeface designer's income will come from a few heavy hitters; so without charging more for big websites, they'd have to raise the price for small ones, pricing hobbyists like me out of the market. Big font companies, though, often require you to install intrusive javascript tracking code to enforce these agreements, which is a step too far for me.

Fonts are pretty much a pure crystallization of the "information wants to be free"/"artists want to be paid" tradeoff. Digital fonts are nothing but information, so it seems absurd to charge more for using them on more websites/in more documents/with a larger team - there's no additional cost being incurred!; but without artificial restrictions on reuse, typeface designers wouldn't get paid at all.

tl;dr You're going to get better treatment and better prices from little one-person font designer shops than from the big companies (Monotype, Hoefler & Co). Unless you're a big co yourself, the OP is right; they're a waste of your time. But the little guys are a decent option, you just have to hunt around.

[manuelmoreale]

I didn't know about DJR's Font of the Month Club. That's kinda neat.

> That said, usage tiers (where you must pay more if your website gets a certain # of views/month) seem ubiquitous. I think these are ok

Why do you think that's ok if you don't mind me asking? I worked on sites that used to generate lots of views but made 0 money because were not designed to be commercial projects. Why should I pay more money for a digital asset just because my site gets popular? It's not getting popular because of the font. Can you imagine if a CMS started charging you more money if your site becomes popular? What difference does it make to them? I just find it baffling.

[spiralpolitik]

This is 100% what prevents me from using paid fonts with views/month.

In a lot of cases, you cannot predict ahead of time what your page views are going to be. All it takes is a page to go viral on social media and you've blown through your allocation in a day. Even worse you have no idea on what the overage will be as most font licenses say "call us" if you need more than the X/month the package delivers.

[CharlesW]

It's just normal price segmentation as applied to a creative work. The idea is that Nestlé can and should pay more for a typeface to be part of the voice of a brand than, say, a family-run bakery.

[manuelmoreale]

That I get but there's literally an entire world in between a family-run bakery and Nestlé. And prices are right now completely idiotic for most normal businesses.

And also, even though I understand the overall concept, why should Nestlé pay more? I'm asking as a general concept.

Should a freelancer charge more money for the same amount of work to a large client just because they're a large client?

[rntz]

One argument is: if font designers had to pick just one price, instead of charging a higher price to bigger customers and a lower price to smaller ones, they'd need to pick a higher price in order to recoup their costs. This would price some smaller customers out of the market entirely.

The comparison with a freelancer misses the weirdness of digital goods, where there's zero marginal cost. The work of designing a font is only done once, and then has to be recouped over many sales; since each sale involves basically zero additional work, any choice of how to split up the cost among customers is inevitably artificial, and not based on how much work it represents.

And of course, any artificial way to decide how much each customer pays is going to screw somebody over for no good reason. I don't think there is a perfect solution here.