How a type foundry sells fonts online.

The four routes

Most independent foundries use more than one. A common arrangement is a marketplace or two for reach, and a shop on the foundry’s own site for the buyers who come looking for it. The routes differ in who sets the licence terms, who is the seller on the invoice, whose records the buyer ends up in, and how much of each sale reaches you.

Marketplaces and distributors

A distributor brings buyers you couldn’t reach alone and handles payment, tax and support. In exchange it keeps part of every sale. In a 2018 TypeDrawers thread on royalty rates, foundries reported receiving 50% of the price at most general retailers and 65% to 70% at a few, with lower shares on some web and OEM licences. Those were individual reports and terms change, so ask for the current agreement in writing.

Exclusivity is the second trade-off. An exclusive deal can come with an advance or a higher share, and it stops you selling the same family anywhere else, sometimes including your own site. A non-exclusive listing leaves you free at the usual rate.

The distributor also decides how your licences look. Many work out every tier’s price from one base price with their own formula, as foundries discuss in a TypeDrawers thread on tier pricing, so your user bands and pageview tiers may not match the ones on your own site. Each distributor has its own EULA or wraps yours in its terms, and a buyer who finds two different documents for the same font can’t tell which applies. The buyer is the distributor’s customer: you usually get a sales report without names or email addresses.

For many independents the distributors carry most of the volume. In a 2015 TypeDrawers thread, two designers reported that their own sites brought in about 7% and 10.5% of their sales that year. One or two non-exclusive listings first, with your own shop beside them later, keeps sales coming while the shop is built.

A generic e-commerce cart

A hosted store builder, a cart plugin on a self-run site or a website builder’s buy buttons are cheap and quick to start. One foundry in a TypeDrawers thread on foundry websites reported running a website builder with an embedded buy button for about $250 a year plus payment fees. For a foundry with a few families and one licence, that can be enough.

These carts are built for many products with few variations each. A font catalogue is the reverse, and it shows in five places.

• Licence tiers. A generic cart models a product as a few option dimensions, such as size and colour. A font licence needs styles times licence kinds times tiers, and sometimes a term, which outgrows the options on offer. Family prices, and bundles that don’t charge a style twice, need custom code or an app.
• Per-order files. A digital-download add-on sends every buyer the same file. Nothing in it says who licensed it, so a copy found online can’t be traced to an order.
• EULAs. The cart records that a box was ticked, at most. It doesn’t keep which version of your EULA the buyer accepted, which matters the first time you revise it.
• Webfonts. A web licence priced by pageviews needs the buyer to self-host and report on trust, or a hosted kit that counts, and a generic cart has neither. The guide to pageview licences compares the two.
• Licensee details. A studio often buys a licence for a client. The cart has a billing address and no field for the licensee.

Each gap can be filled with a plugin or a script, and each fill is one more thing to keep working every time the cart updates.

A hosted foundry shop

A hosted foundry shop is made for type. Licence tiers, families, specimens, type testers, trial fonts and webfont delivery are part of it, and the service maintains the code. You pay a subscription, a commission on sales, or both. The things to check are whose payment account the money lands in, whether you can use your own domain, what an export contains, and what happens to your buyers’ downloads if you leave. The questions to ask a font shop service go through them one by one.

What you give up is control. The shop does what the service does, and a licence model the service doesn’t support is hard to add from outside.

A custom build

A custom build can do whatever your licences need. It’s also the most expensive route. One foundry owner in a TypeDrawers thread on foundry shops described a “$20,000+ budget and a 12month+ development window”, and others describe builds that ran long because requirements turned up during the work.

The build is the smaller cost. Payment providers change their APIs, tax rules change, frameworks reach the end of their support, and the developer who wrote the code moves on. The same owner wrote later in the thread that running the shop takes a lot of time on maintenance, updates, marketing and customer communications.

A custom site doesn’t have to mean a custom back office. Keeping a custom site with a different back office behind it covers that split.

What every route has to handle

Licence models

Desktop licences by users, web by monthly pageviews, apps by the number of apps and sometimes a term, and then broadcast, ePub and the larger deals you price by hand. Write down your tiers and their prices before choosing a route, and check that the route can express every one of them. The guide to pricing licences works through a price table. How Typetin models licences shows one way to lay them out, and the guide to pageview licences covers web tiers.

Delivery

Which formats each licence delivers, how long a download link lasts, whether a buyer can download again a year later, and whether each file carries a record of the order it came from. The guide to font fingerprinting covers that record and its limits.

Tax

When you sell to consumers in the EU, VAT on downloaded fonts is generally due at the buyer’s rate, and the EU’s One Stop Shop lets you declare it in one return. Other countries have rules of their own. Either you are the seller and register where you need to, or a merchant of record sells on your behalf and handles it for a fee. Marketplaces are usually the merchant of record. Generic carts and custom builds usually leave it to you. An accountant should confirm what applies to you.

EULAs

Your EULA defines what each licence allows. The shop has to show it before payment, record that the buyer accepted it, and keep which version they accepted after you revise it. The guide to font EULAs goes through what to keep. This isn’t legal advice. Have a lawyer read your own text.

Designers’ shares

A label or collective sells typefaces by several designers, each with a share that can change when a contract does. Someone has to divide every sale, after discounts and refunds, and send each designer a statement. Marketplaces report sales per family and generic carts report orders, so the division ends up in a spreadsheet unless the shop records shares on each order line. The guide to royalty splits works through the sums.

A decision table

The routes combine. A foundry can list with distributors, run its own shop for direct buyers and quote large licences by hand, as long as one place holds the record of every licence it has issued.

Where Typetin fits

Typetin is a hosted foundry shop with a licensing and sales back office behind it. It lists your fonts nowhere else, so it sits beside any distributors you use. Buyers pay your own Stripe account or a merchant-of-record provider, and we take 0% commission on a monthly or yearly subscription. Every order records the EULA version the buyer accepted, and every delivered file carries a fingerprint of its order. A foundry with a custom site can keep it in front and read the catalogue through the API. The API starts on the Foundry plan. How the shop works.