Is it more expensive that designing an entirely new font?

That's why they didn't design an entirely new font. Instead they made semi-automated modifications to a free font, and then tweaked a few specific characters afterwards.

The result is not as good as what they had before, and not as good as it would have been if they hired a professional to design a new font from scratch, but it was cheap and solved their problem.

They took something workable and Arial-ised it. And now they're using a bland, mediocre font.

Fonts are weird voodoo. Good and bad choices can both make a measurable difference to ROI.

So I'm not convinced this is going to be the profit booster they hope.