Why Fontdeck is Retiring | Hacker News Reader

Why Fontdeck is Retiring

blog.fontdeck.com

31 pointsdangrossman7 comments

I pulled this line from their pricing page:

    Typical price is $7.50/year per font

And that, in a sentence, is their real problem: underpriced by at least an order—if not two—of magnitude.

You have to remember that any typeface you'd want to use probably consists of several fonts. Usually you have at least regular, bold, italic and bold italic.

So that's already four fonts: 4*7.50 = $30 / year.

$30/year = $2.50/month. Good luck trying to run a business on that.

True. In my case, I've been paying for 10 fonts. That's $6.25 / month -- still peanuts.

If they had doubled the price and changed the billing period to 6 months, I wouldn't even have noticed because the price is so low.

There's no mention of them trying to sell it. I wonder if they tried? I'd imagine anything with 1000s of paying customers would have some interest.

Yeah, kind of weird.

IIRC there are foundries whose fonts are only available on Fontdeck. (I pay for some fonts on Fontdeck for that reason.)

Wouldn't that exclusivity have market value for someone like Adobe's TypeKit? But perhaps the contracts with the foundries have a termination clause that activates if Fontdeck were acquired, so the buyer would have to renegotiate.

> we have thousands of paying customers

> Typical price is $7.50/year per font

Assume there are 5000 paying customers. The annual income is only $37500. It's too low. The company is running out of money.

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