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Comment by ejcx | Hacker News Reader

Am I understanding this correctly? Just under 10% of the cost was spent on fonts? $~800? That seems unbelievably high.

It's a one time cost. The others are monthly costs. Most likely they're paying for a redistributable licence which is much more expensive than other licences.

For instance, take a look at this font I'm currently integrating into the app I'm working on:

https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/intelligent-foundry/averta/ https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/intelligent-foundry/averta/buy...

If you want to put these on the web, you're paying $200 per font type. If you want to buy the whole family, that's almost $1200.

Companies with a design focus are happy to pay this in order to differentiate themselves from others.

Correct—the font licenses were a one-time cost. Previously, I was using Typekit, but I hit an issue with the requests stalling for ~3 seconds. Apparently, Chrome has a threshold of not loading more than ~5 requests from a single external location at once, which resulted in the stall. I reached out to the font foundries and they were incredibly helpful in letting me try out the fonts for performance testing. When loaded from my own CDN, they loaded instantly. At the time, I had some extra cash from a freelance gig I just wrapped up, so I went for the font licenses. To me, as the designer/developer/one-man-team, it was important to have design I intended for Cushion along with good performance—and supporting the font designers who were so helpful.

I think the limit for Chrome is a bit higher - 6 or so resources from the same location will cause the stall. You can usually see this happening if you watch the "Resources" tab in Chrome Dev Tools and watch the timings for loading each resource.

Are you allowed to use these fonts in a native mobile app?

Unfortunately, no—that's a different license, which is strangely much more expensive than a web license.

Indeed. For me this expense is totally overpriced.

I've always thought that bigger companies use font services like that and not startups.

That's the only eye-raising cost to me. I guess when a designer requests it then there's no compromise.

Yeah, fonts are expensive, and I wouldn't go near a free font I found on the web unless it was hosted by someone like Google. So if you don't like any of Google's free font options, you gotta pay.

Also, there is no cost for a designer in the pricing, so either that is a startup cost not included in the ongoing pricing, or is done in house. And a designer is not cheap.

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