I like Matthew Butterick’s approach. He sells whole families at a time (on a pay-once basis), offers discounts if you get the whole library, and the license is short, to the point, and reasonable: https://mbtype.com/license/
Now some font license is expecting me to keep track of how many people a document gets shared with? Dystopian. What if I print it? Why is that allowed, but a digital file is not? How does that mesh with "Licensed users can use my fonts in any way they like"?
Also what does it even mean with a read-only format? Every file format can be ripped and converted, even if there is no widely known tooling to do so. A read-only format is not a thing that is possible. You can always just take some screenshots, or use a scanner, and reconstruct the font.
I assume documents like to-be-completed PDF's where an end-user may be filling in the blanks (Acrobat, DocuSign, etc).
They'll be happy to let use the fonts for whatever you want but you'll have to pay more.
That said, I think once you get to pre-paid expiring page views, that's a sign that we've entered the realm of insanity.
Were I a typeface designer, I'd like to think I'd say to myself, Self, what are the odds? Just charge $20 and rely on human decency. But I'm not a typeface designer, and my guess is that people who have tried that have found that human decency is thin on the ground among the subset of people who care about using typefaces on websites. But I'm just guessing.
Companies are under no obligation to pay more than what you are asking for. If you want more, then license it the way you want.
For a more gracious understanding of my comment, consider that I meant human decency might compel someone to honor the terms of the license, rather than abuse or ignore them. Relying solely on human decency would mean no auditing, no installed spyware, etc. That so few companies go this route suggests that despite having clear licenses, the humans involved aren't practicing decency enough to pay the bills.
Apologies for misunderstanding your post. I read it in the context of "companies should offed to pay more because they can afford it." Which is not what you said.
Of course this isn't a company thing. (companies are often very pro-active about licensing.) Humans on the other hand are very good at ignoring the rules - just read pretty much any thread on Netflix.
We'd see similar restrictions on licensing for other 'tools' (compilers, maybe?!), if there wasn't so much competition including open-source options.
I don’t know why exactly, I think because it indicates a type of disconnected user that is hard to otherwise describe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
And yes, I also wish everyone used this license everywhere.