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Comment by jorams | Hacker News Reader

For a paid font $75 for an unlimited lifetime license is not at all expensive. I suspect the difficulty isn't so much getting people to pay $75 for a font, but getting people to pay for a font in the first place. The font market is essentially split between free fonts and expensive fonts. The people willing to pay for fonts are not particularly price sensitive, because if they were they would just be using a free font.

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It's also that the market for "font customers" (for typesetting, design, etc.) and for developers who want a font in VSCode is very, very different.

What I'm seeing in this discussion is that the developer market is pretty price-sensitive, possibly because they're paying out of pocket and not charging back to clients or expensing.

> The people willing to pay for fonts are not particularly price sensitive, because if they were they would just be using a free font.

Fair enough, there might not be as many people ready to pay for a font as I imagine.

As for the price, it's entirely to the discretion of the maker and it's impossible to determine what the value is for the customer, so I'm not judging that.

It does price out people from lower purchasing power countries and people who are short on cash (hey that's me). But as you mentioned, it's very possible that a lot of these people would rather use a free font.

I'll save this one for when I have more disposable income :)

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