Filed under: Font News
It’s only a week into testing out my new $1.99 per font price point, but I gotta say the response to the change is a resounding “meh.” No big upside surprise, but nothing really bad happened either. A couple fonts were reduced from $49 to $1.99, but mostly it was free fonts that were taken out of free circulation and priced up to two bucks. I figured $1.99 is the sweet spot for iPhone apps, so I might try that with my fonts. Seems to be that’s the cost that people will buy something without thinking too hard about it. Sure would be nice if there were more impulse buyers in the font world. Or if they sold fonts at the iTunes store.
Who knows? Maybe things’d be different if I accepted PayPal at my site. That’s coming soon. I personally find PayPal is a much easier way to pay for less-expensive items. No worry about credit card security when you don’t even have to take out your wallet. Trusting PayPal is pretty easy, whereas a independent little website that just sells fonts might seem a little shadier.
And I guess I never really mentioned that I updated all the font files on those old freefonts, either. For the last few years I’ve been dishing out nothing but TTF-format freefonts, optimized for your computer screen. (Technically they’re TTF-flavored OpenType, but still TrueType nonetheless.) The new versions I’m selling at $1.99 now are all .OTF-flavored OpenType, which looks just about as good on your monitor, but also uses the Post-Script style outlines that old-school designers are so fond of. It’s a pretty slight technical difference, so I never even mentioned it anywhere, but the $1.99 version is a bit better than older versions of these former freefonts.
And they come with a Commercial Use license upgrade, too. As freefonts, these typefaces were served to you with a Personal Use license. The new for-sale versions come with a limited Commercial Use license, which lets a small biz use the fonts for just about anything (except a logo) and big biz can use ’em, too (just contact me for an upgrade if you’ve got lots of users at one site). Yeah, so that’s something else that’s really nice for customers who get the $1.99 fonts.
Like I said I never really mentioned any of this stuff, so it just looks like I changed some prices. But there was a little more going on behind the scenes. I guess that’s good enough content for a blog, right? I apologize in advance for any confusion, and I hope you continue to enjoy the freefonts and quality pay-fonts I make available for you at Chank.com.
Now, let’s continue on to my previous post, where I salute my top ten freefonts of 2009, which sadly are mostly NOT free anymore…
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