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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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I really don't get this strategy, it sounds like "we'd rather make $0 than $380" to me, unless they're really the only font out there and paying a designer for 6 months still can't get the job done.
If even one company opts to keep paying the license, that makes up for over 50 cancellations. They need less than 1/50 of their current licensees to continue paying to break even.
It's shitty, but it's basically a company taking themselves out of an entry-level market to extract more money from the types of clients where $20,500 is a rounding error.
This is what most companies seem to be aiming for these days as well, along with business-to-business sales as opposed to business-to-consumer sales.
For a long time now, many companies have stopped trying to increase profits by increasing the customer base, but rather are shrinking the customer base with intent to make up the difference and then some with increased costs.
I did some back of the napkin math on the price increases for Xbox Game Pass the last time around, and the numbers were basically that they could lose about a third of their customers for Game Pass and still break even, so as long as they lost less than a third of their customer base, they were still creating more profit than before. They would need to be pushing losing fully half of all subscribers for it to make a negative dent on their profits.
This is late stage capitalism. This is rent extraction where they are indeed happier to make $0 because their customer base was already so vast that they can afford to have a significant portion of those customers bail and they will still make money.
its pretty rampant these days. My dad had been using a web hosting company since the 90's, and recently they got bought by some investment bank that just raised prices about 6x with barely any warning. He had to scramble to migrate the bulk of the stuff he had on there to somewhere more sane.
I'd argue that the ratio needs to be much higher than 1/50 to compensate for the increase in risk. It's a lot easier to lose a handful of customers than hundreds. And this increase doesn't look good at all for the customers that stay.
Capitalists are only interested in quarterly profits, not this "long term sustainability" BS. Just look at oil companies and global warming. They'd rather literally destroy the planet with the status quo than innovate a long term solution.
Same concept is behind why fast food is so expensive now.
They're fine with fewer customers if they can charge each one more.
Also, there's probably a lot of money to be made in being a font hunter for these companies. You find a company that has infringed on the font holder's rights. You bring that information to them. You get permission to sue on their behalf and then reap the rewards. And most companies will fork out the $20,000 rather than spend $50 or $100,000 on Litigation, and the font rights holder will catch the $20,000 on the year after for free
Fonts cannot be easily removed or replaced. Sometimes for technical reasons and sometimes for branding or operational reasons. So you pay their extortion or they sue you and get it anyway. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They are the comic villain kind of evil.
to be fair, anyone using a font for branding that requires an annual subscription, put themselves in that spot. I think the reasons would be technical in this case. But they're basically betting that $20k/y in a couple years couldn't pay for the efforts to replace it, and I think that's really risky.
Monotype is functionally an international monopoly. More than Luxottica, but for many of the same reasons. If the small selection of open source fonts don’t do what a company needs, then their only option other than Monotype is to have a font created. Monotype owns almost everything font related. Companies, fonts, everything.