Font Licensing is Broken. Here’s How We’re Fixing it.
We need a radically simplified approach to font licensing that puts transparency and fairness first.
Published on
Background
If you use fonts, you probably already hate font licences.
We don’t blame you. The reputation of the font industry as a whole has been defined by its worst practices, painting it as a murky world filled with traps designed to trip you up. It’s a minefield where you might be sued for using a legally licensed font in a logo, or where the price of a licence is based on how much money you have, rather than the value you actually get from using the font.
For the sake of sanity, we need to champion transparency and simplicity in font licensing. But to do that, we need to be honest about where the industry has gone wrong, and aggressive in putting it right.
The Story So Far
For us, the structure of font licensing has always been a struggle between precision and simplicity.
For many, the current industry default is ‘bundling’ – forcing you to buy unrelated rights that you don’t need just to get the one you do. We have never liked this model; we think it’s presumptive, wasteful, and pushes risk and costs onto the customer.
Our philosophy has always been the strict fairness of usage-based licensing: you should only pay for the value you get from the font – how many people use the font, how many impressions it makes, how many devices it ships with – not for who you are, what you earn, or what you might do in the future.
But there’s an uncomfortable truth: in pursuit of fairness, we created granularity. We split rights into small slices to avoid overcharging, and the unintended result was ‘licence anxiety’ – the fear that one wrong move, one new format, or one overlooked clause would put you in legal trouble.
Fair should not feel this fragile.
A New Standard: Simple, Right, and Fair
We believe that our new approach, introduced today, is the simplest that font licensing can currently be without sacrificing fairness. We’re removing the granular distinctions and introducing four clear, modern licence types, based on real actions, not technical hair-splitting.
What We Promise:
- Perpetual rights: Every new retail licence is yours forever with no recurring fees. If your needs change, you can upgrade at any time.
- No hidden fees: We do not charge extra for using our fonts in artwork for a logo. We never have, and we never will.
- No ‘size’ traps: We don’t care how big or profitable your company is; we care how much you use the font. That is the only fair metric.
Our New Structure
We’ve consolidated all retail uses into four broad licence types that reflect the reality of 2026:
- Install & Use: Install fonts on your devices and use them to create documents, presentations, social media content, and artwork. We’ve modernized the definition of a ‘user’ and, for the first time, explicitly included unattended devices like digital signage and kiosks. You shouldn’t need a lawyer’s sign-off to put a font on a lobby screen.
- Host & Link: Self-host webfonts and link them via CSS to your own websites and online ads. By combining web and ad traffic into one metric, you’ll reach our volume discount tiers sooner.
- Embed & Distribute: Embed fonts into products that you distribute, such as eBooks, apps, games, and hardware devices. If your project pivots from eBook to app, you don’t need a new licence; you just keep counting.
- Unlimited: Total peace of mind. Everything above without limits, plus software bundle distribution and server installation.
(Quick note: This new structure applies only to our retail font library. If you are a custom font client, nothing changes – you continue to own your font family’s intellectual property outright, with no font licences required.)
FontPass, in Parallel
We’re also bringing the same clarity to our subscription service, FontPass. Whether you subscribe to our library or buy individual perpetual licences, the terms stay consistent and comparable. If you’re a FontPass subscriber, you’ll see these clearer entitlements across the service immediately.
For members of our free FontPass for Creative Agencies tier, this is especially useful. The broad rights in ‘Install & Use’ align with how agencies actually work: moving fluidly from concept to paid commercial output. You are free to create and deliver final artwork to clients, provided they don’t need the font files.
Conclusion
We see a font industry trend towards more restrictive clauses, more contractual exclusions, and increasingly opaque pricing. We are opting out of that game.
We want no surprises. We want transparency. When you license a font from the Dalton Maag library, we want it to feel like a partnership that is simple, right, and fair.
