25 questions to ask before you sell your fonts through a service.

Get the answers in writing

Ask them in writing and keep the answers. A sales call is a good place to hear how a service thinks and a poor place to get a commitment. Where you can, check an answer yourself: request a sample export, place a test order, read the terms of service for the clauses on cancellation and data. A service that answers a question with “on the roadmap” hasn’t answered it.

Money

1. What commission do you take on each sale, and on which part of it? A percentage taken from the total including tax costs more than one taken from the net price. On a $2,000 licence, every point of commission is $20.
2. What else is charged, and by whom? Payment processing, currency conversion, tax calculation, extra seats in the admin and hosted webfont traffic can each carry a fee. Add them up for a typical month.
3. Whose payment account does the money land in? If buyers pay an account in your name, you hold the funds, the refunds and the payment history. If they pay the service, you wait for a transfer and depend on it to pass on refunds and disputes correctly.
4. Who is the seller on the buyer’s invoice? If it’s you, tax registration and filing are yours. If a merchant of record sells for you, it handles tax and takes a larger fee. Know which you’re choosing. An accountant should confirm what applies to you.
5. Can you set your own price in each currency? Automatic conversion turns a $60 style into €55.37 one day and €56.02 the next. A price you set per currency stays round, and a buyer sees the same price twice.

Ownership

6. What does the export contain, and in what format? Ask for a list, then a sample. A useful export holds the catalogue, the original font files, customers, orders, licences issued, EULA versions and royalty records, in formats such as CSV and JSON that another system can read.
7. Can you export after cancelling, or with a failed payment? The export matters most when the relationship ends badly. One that needs an active subscription can be out of reach at exactly that moment.
8. Whose is the domain? You should register your domain yourself and point it at the shop with a DNS record. A shop that only lives on the service’s address takes your search history with it when you leave.
9. Whose customers are they? Ask whether you can email your buyers, and whether the service contacts them for its own purposes. A service that is also a marketplace can recommend other foundries’ fonts to your buyers.

Licensing

10. Can every tier of every licence you sell be set up as it is? Bring your price list and ask for it to be modelled while you watch: user bands, pageview bands, app counts, terms, and the larger licences you price by hand. A service whose fixed tiers differ from yours changes your prices for you.
11. How are families, bundles and upgrades priced? A buyer who owns three styles and buys the family expects to pay for the rest. Ask how the service handles it, or whether it handles it at all.
12. Are licences with a term supported, and are renewals reminded? App and some web licences run for a year or more. Someone has to tell the buyer before the term ends.
13. Can you issue a quote that holds its price? Large licences are agreed over weeks. A quote should keep the price and the EULA as they were on the day it was sent, even if you change your price list before the buyer pays.
14. Is the EULA version each buyer accepted recorded on the order? When you revise your EULA, past buyers remain under the version they accepted. Without a record, proving which one that was is guesswork. The shop’s job is to keep the record. Your EULA text is a matter for a lawyer, and this isn’t legal advice.

Delivery

15. Is each delivered file marked with its order? A fingerprint in the file links a copy found online back to the order it came from. Ask what it records and what it can’t prove.
16. How are webfonts delivered and counted? If you sell web licences by monthly pageviews, ask whether the service hosts the fonts, how a pageview is counted, and what happens when a site goes over its tier.
17. Are trial fonts cut from your files, and how? A trial font should be a reduced file with its own name, never the retail file behind a different button.
18. How long do download links last, and can buyers download again? Buyers come back years later for a new computer. Ask what happens to their downloads after a refund.

Designers

19. Can each typeface carry several designers’ shares? Labels and collectives divide most sales. Ask whether a share can change on a date when a contract does, without rewriting past sales.
20. What does a royalty statement show? Ask for one per designer, per period, after discounts and refunds, in a file you can send them. Ask how refunds and partial refunds are taken off.

Integration

21. Is there an API, and what can it read? If your foundry has its own website, it needs the catalogue, prices and orders from the shop. Ask for the documentation before you sign.
22. Can your own website stay in front? Many foundries have a site they like, with type testers built for their families. Ask whether buyers can go from your pages to the service’s checkout and back without feeling the join, and whether the checkout can sit on a subdomain of yours.
23. Are there webhooks, and are they signed and retried? A webhook tells your site or your accounts about a sale. An unsigned one can be faked, and one that isn’t retried is lost while your site is down.

Leaving

24. What happens on the day you cancel? Ask whether the shop stays up until the end of the period you paid for, and whether a final export is made for you.
25. What happens to your buyers’ downloads and hosted webfonts? Their licences outlive your subscription. Ask how long their links and kits keep working, and plan to serve them yourself after that.

Typetin’s answers

Numbered as the questions above.

1. No commission: you pay a monthly or yearly subscription (pricing).
2. Payment, conversion and tax fees are between you and your payment provider, and admin seats beyond your plan’s cost extra.
3. Your own Stripe account, or a merchant-of-record provider you connect.
4. You are the seller unless you use the merchant-of-record provider.
5. Yes: you set a price in each currency you sell in, and Typetin converts nothing.
6. A ZIP of the catalogue, your original font files, images, customers, orders, licences, royalty records and the text of every EULA version, as JSON and CSV, on every plan.
7. Yes, in every billing status and after you cancel, and on cancellation Typetin emails a final export to every owner (what’s yours).
8. Yours, at your own registrar, pointed at the shop with a DNS record, on every plan.
9. Yours. Typetin sends your buyers only order receipts, sign-in links, quotes, renewal reminders and account mail, from your foundry’s sender, and lists your fonts nowhere else.
10. Yes: each licence is a table of tiers you edit (licensing).
11. Bundles are sold within one typeface, and a style already in the cart is charged once. There is no upgrade pricing, and no credit for styles a buyer bought in an earlier order.
12. Yes: term licences, with renewal reminders 30 and 7 days before the end.
13. Yes, held for 30 days or up to a year. Quotes start on the Foundry plan.
14. Yes, on every order (EULAs).
15. Yes: a fingerprint of its order, on every plan.
16. Hosted kits count pageviews and keep serving over the limit, or buyers self-host. Hosted kits start on the Foundry plan.
17. Yes: trial fonts are cut from your files to basic Latin.
18. Links last 90 days, and buyers get new ones from their account while their licences are active. A full refund, a dispute or a revoked licence stops them.
19. Yes: each typeface carries its designers’ shares with the date each starts, and every order line records the shares in force when it sold.
20. Per designer, per currency, as CSV, and Typetin moves no money to designers (royalty statements). Royalty statements start on the Foundry plan.
21. Yes: the API reads the catalogue, orders, licences and customers. The API starts on the Foundry plan.
22. Yes: the shop runs on a subdomain of yours, and your pages link into it.
23. Yes: webhooks for paid and refunded orders, signed with HMAC-SHA256 and sent up to 8 times over about 45 hours, with the API.
24. The shop sells until the paid period ends. Then checkout stops, the admin turns read-only, and Typetin emails a final export to every owner.
25. They keep working after you cancel. Closing the foundry suspends the shop, releases your custom domains and deletes its records once the final export is ready, and then buyers’ download links and hosted kits stop.