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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

I am the only one who finds fonts a bit expensive for personal use? It is not a rant, I am not saying it isn't worth it, that font designers can't make money, etc... But that puts it on the same level as tools like Sublime Text or Beyond Compare. For me, it is enough of a turn off not to use a commercial font, especially considering that the free offering is quite good.

I totally understand the higher price for commercial use, here, it is cheap compared to the costs of hiring a designer, and it may have a real impact on your sales and ultimately earn you money.

But why is the price for personal use around $60? Is it some kind of a sweet spot because most people won't buy fonts anyways, even for $1, but those who do expect to pay that kind of money. Does it account for piracy, which I guess is easy and goes unnoticed if you only use it personally?

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Selling font direct to consumers is extremely bad business model. This doesn’t work. People are not keen on shelling out 100s of dollars when IDEs already come with decent fonts and other thousands of free fonts readily available. This font looks great but most people would argue about marginal benefit. I would hope they would partner with IDE makers and big tech and give them license to use it for their expected revenue instead.

Sorry, but no IDE comes with a proper 3278-like font. Not even IBM's Developer for z/OS comes with one (they commissioned that other font called Plex... who would take seriously a font named after a media player?).

Luckily, everyone can get one at https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font.

Note: shameless plug ;-)

That is delightful. I remember using 3270's back in "the lab" in high school ("alt-pf2" twice to compile!), and marveling at the individual phosphors on the screen. (When I could see better, for sure.)

Sadly, it doesn’t turn the keyboard into a beam spring one…

That's another expensive hobby to get into

I can make it sound like a Selectric, at least:

https://github.com/rbanffy/selectric-mode

I have an aftermarket buckling spring KB. Well, my wife "has" it, and I will never, ever get it back.

I also think creators of this font likely have not performed any market testing or studied price-revenue curves. I might take a bet that $5 flat price would produce higher revenues. Another option for them is to bundle many such fonts by forming group with other creators together. That has higher chance of selling a professional fonts as package to IDE makers and big tech.

A while back, I wanted to try MonoLisa out for a bit before spending all of the money on it. I ended up finding the .zip on a shady website after some creative searching and used it for about a month.

I tried to switch back to another font and found that I was actually really enjoying MonoLisa... I ended up just spending the money since I felt a bit guilty staring at it for 8+ hours a day without paying the creators. Now, installing it is one of my first steps when setting up a new environment.

They already have a value added tiered price model. They just need to add a free tier.

Wow, the pricing changes my perspective quite a bit. I wouldn't have even considered paying $5 for a font. Think it's just one of those things I'm used to not having to pay for.

I guess if you find the current free offerings problematic then $55 is nothing for prolonged comfort if it does what it says on the tin.

For me i've always found the default in VSC on OSX to be really nice.

Tried ligatures once but it just became confusing tbh

Yeah, unfortunately I can't really see a viable use case for professional (i.e. paid for) fonts for personal use. Like you, I understand that font designers need to make money, but there's just not $60+ of value in a font for me, particularly one where my reaction is "oh, this seems like it might be marginally better than my current font, maybe I'll check it out".

It's just barely hitting the potential value where I'm willing to hit the download button, tacking on another $60 on top of that is just a complete non-starter for me. And trying to make money by shame (i.e. font makers deserve money) doesn't seem like it's viable long-term.

Same here. I liked it and wanted to buy it, but I didn't want to give €55. If it was 30 or 28.XX something, I will be using it already.

It is nothing rational, just a buyer's reaction to a product and its price.

I guess maybe because developers are the target audience and they happen to make a lot of money?

But then developers also know how to use devtools in their browser.

Does DRM exist for typefaces?

The shapes of a font cannot be copyrighted, trademarked or patented. The name can be trademarked. The code itself for the font is copyrighted.

Careful what you say about copyright. While this might be true (up to some degree) in the USA & Japan, it’s definitely not true in many other countries (e.g. Germany, France, Russia & the UK).

In the US it might also be possible to protect a font design with a design patent, so even there you should be careful about assuming it’s safe to copy a font’s design…

Is this enforced to any realistic degree? For example, is something like Arial, which is a clear derivative of Helvetica permitted?

There you have another reason: the pricing needs to account for those who prefer paying with devtools coupons.

No, you aren't. I sympathize with them. Its a lot of work to create, and they should get their money's worth. But it takes time for me to decide whether I really like a font, and I'm not going to pay $60 for the chance to figure that out. I wouldn't pay $6 either, though I might if I had more money to spend care-freely.

Would be wonderful if they could charge 1/x cents per character used up until some fixed price point. but what an intrusive business model that would be.

The font is used on the web page itself. You can trivially yoink it out of there and install it on your system if you really like it. I doubt anyone ever pays for fonts for personal use.

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