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Why Fontdeck is Retiring
- dansingerman 11y agoThere's no mention of them trying to sell it. I wonder if they tried? I'd imagine anything with 1000s of paying customers would have some interest.
- pavlov 11y agoYeah, kind of weird. IIRC there are foundries whose fonts are only available on Fontdeck. (I pay for some fonts on Fontdeck for that reason.) Wouldn't that exclusivity have market value for someone like Adobe's TypeKit? But perhaps the contracts with the foundries have a termination clause that activates if Fontdeck were acquired, so the buyer would have to renegotiate.
- aaronbrethorst 11y agoI pulled this line from their pricing page: Typical price is $7.50/year per font And that, in a sentence, is their real problem: underpriced by at least an order—if not two—of magnitude.
- pavlov 11y agoYou have to remember that any typeface you'd want to use probably consists of several fonts. Usually you have at least regular, bold, italic and bold italic. So that's already four fonts: 4*7.50 = $30 / year.
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago$30/year = $2.50/month. Good luck trying to run a business on that.
- pavlov 11y agoTrue. In my case, I've been paying for 10 fonts. That's $6.25 / month -- still peanuts. If they had doubled the price and changed the billing period to 6 months, I wouldn't even have noticed because the price is so low.
- vinceyuan 11y ago> we have thousands of paying customers > Typical price is $7.50/year per font Assume there are 5000 paying customers. The annual income is only $37500. It's too low. The company is running out of money.