Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

I run a business called FontPeek (https://fontpeek.com). It doesn't provide the majority of my income, but it does provide a meaningful amount and it's constantly growing (pretty linearly). It's a simple tool that allows font designers to add a secure font previewer to their web store. Only needs like an hour of technical support a week, and it's currently costing me nothing to run because Firebase has incredibly generous pricing.

It started out because a designer who sells fonts wanted to hire me to build a font previewer for their website so that customers could demo the fonts without being able to steal them. I quoted them the price and they said it was out of their price range. I said I would build it for free if they subscribed for a low monthly payment. They were ecstatic at the deal and invited their friends to sign up. Turned out it was an unsolved niche in the font design community. I posted it to a few websites where people were asking for a tool that does this. The rest is history.

(not a designer) I would not start my 7-day free trial without beforehand having more information on what the product looks and feels like.

In the "How FontPeek Helps" section there's "Show your fonts" sections, but it shows no fonts. I'd love to see some demo fonts/pages with embedded fonts at least, perhaps a list of links to the designer's websites showing the widget (I assume it's a widget, there's no info on it) if they consent.

Yeah, super weird. Surely they could just slap the font viewer thing right there above the fold and be like, "this is it, here it is."

If you are into typography you know what this thing looks like. This is super niche.

Thanks for the perspective. It's been on my todo list to add customer testimonials with links back to their websites along with samples and tutorials. It's just a matter of getting it done :)

Typically though people just email me or message me via Crisp asking for live examples.

It looks like your only pricing tier is $10/mo - which is an _insanely_ cheap price in the scheme of things. Keep everyone grandfathered in at the current prices and raise it to at least $25/mo with a premium plan(s) at $100/mo and $350/mo.

I suspect that you'll pretty quickly triple your revenue.

With the current pricing model, I'm undercutting the possibility of any competitors to arise, plus I'm not sure how ethical it is to charge so much for a service that's basically a monopoly (i.e. price-gouging) when I doubt font designers even have very high margins as it is.

I've considered doing this though, and the fact that you're validating it now makes me think it may be worth testing it out for a little while just to see what happens.

Just for my understanding, as soon as someone buys a cut of a font and uses it in a web context, it is basically "out there" and could technically be downloaded by anyone visiting that website since there is no font DRM right? Is this mainly targeted at people making fonts for print?

I was also curious so I've taken a look at it (but not in detail) and it looks to me like it sends what you type to the server that generates an image in real-time using the font, so you don't have the font itself, just what it's going to look like with your text.

That's true but the real business of font is not selling to any average people but to designers and companies, as part of corporate identities.

In fact, it's quite easy to download some non-free font (let's say Helvetica) and to use it on your web page. Then

- either it's a personal page and very few people will see it (and even less notice that it's the "real" Helvetica and not a free simili-Helvetica)... so there's almost no risk to be sued for copyright/stealing. You wouldn't have bought it anyway.

- or it's a professional web page (or design or...) - high traffic - then you can be sure to be sued if you use it but didn't buy it.

Same for business card: nobody will really notice if you use a stolen font on your own business card but you can be sure that everybody will sue you if your business is to print business cards and you propose fonts without licences

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