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Comment by parkersweb | Hacker News Reader

We were typekit users before it was acquired by Adobe. Creating font kits on behalf of clients for websites that you host was standard practice.

It was only last year that I discovered that Adobe has changed the license terms so that it’s no longer permitted. At the same time you can also no longer take out a subscription solely to Adobe fonts - it’s only available as part of a Creative Cloud subscription.

So in order to comply with license terms a client has to take out a subscription for an Adobe product e.g Photoshop in order to legally use a font on their website.

Any wonder why most designers despaired on hearing of the Figma purchase?

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Figma was a VC-funded company. What reason was there to believe they’d do things differently in the long run?

It’s like Lucy and the football. Users are the Charlie Browns who will try their luck with proprietary software again and again, only to have it yanked away when inevitably it gets acquired / goes public / merges with an evil ad company (like what happened to Unity) / etc.

https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html#web-...

This is a good example of where it would be beneficial for cloud bundles to behave a little more like medical insurance in the united states. You start with a lower monthly fee, you pay for what you use up to a maximum, and then hit the cap.

It lets someone buy a subscription for just one thing like fonts, and then by the time you are using three to four products the suite covers itself.

All of that should happen automatically without getting stuck in a subpar tier for year, or being unable to downsize when you stop using a product.

It's the weirdness of the fact that the client has to buy a completely unrelated product in order to get the thing they need.

Typekit used to cost around £50/year - and allowed agencies to use webfonts on their client sites. Now the clients have to spend £26.50 / month on a product they don't actually need in order to get a font on their website...

Was $50/year a loss to grow the business? Did that actually cover the under the covers licensing cost? The font in question is considerably more expensive on its own.

From an intuition standpoint, I would NOT expect my license of web fonts to extend to a client I’m selling my work to. My null hypothesis would be that there is an additional license to acquire.

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