Font Costs and Licensing

Why would a company pay for fonts?

This is likely the reason. I forget the article/post, but I recall reading about this on HN a while back. Basically the licensing for fonts across all platforms can become very costly, so developing a typeface in house becomes an appealing choice once your designs are in front of X number of people (commercial/web/print/etc).

Almost 10% of costs on fonts? WTF?

Fonts are expensive. This would be awesome if not an April Fools joke.

I was trained as a graphic designer. I have people in my circle who made fonts. I know how hard and time consuming it can be. And I wouldn't mind paying a fair price for them. It's the license the problem imo, not the price itself.

why though? it doesn't cost the font makers any more expense when Time serves the font.

It's cheaper. Many fonts require ongoing licensing fees based on views or some other metric. Creating your own font means you own it — no more fees.

It's a money-saving measure. Pay a typographer once and own your own font, vs. having to pay Monotype or whoever a yearly sub with endless licensing issues.

Beware that designer fonts are expensive! Most people don't realize that fonts bundled with Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop might require a license for commercial use!

If you don't like the price feel free to create your own. There are some excellent open source tools available for font creation and manipulation like FontForge. There are also some excellent open source fonts that you can use as a workflow guide.Fonts have historically been expensive because each variant is a significant amount of work, and folks often want ALL THE VARIANTS. You're looking at years for a single variant, and a single family of fonts may be someone's life wor