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If what I just typed makes no sense at all, I blame either my insomnia or the ambien which I refuse to take for it.

Obviously, the other issue is that a publication will pay a gigantic amount of money for a typeface, but HN readers will only reluctantly spend $21. Rather than trying to bridge the gap, it makes sense to sell to the party that values your work the most. Again, this is a very common and sensible pricing dynamic.

Operators of $5/yr SAAS services take heed!

People buy lots of stupid stuff. If they buy hats that their characters can wear in a computer game, they will probably buy fonts, too.

In the meantime, you're not where their bread is buttered yet, so the urgency isn't there.

I can't imagine a reason why you'd want dozens of fonts, any more than I could understand wanting dozens of pairs of dress shoes.

Moreover, like an expensive suit (note: I don't own one of those), there is little intrinsic utility in a premium font; it's practically the definition of a digital luxury. It can thus be priced as a Veblen good --- which it in effect is, to its real market (publications, agencies).

And they link to a law paper, "The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design" (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=878401) by Kal Raustiala and Christopher Jon Sprigman that says: "Yet a significant empirical anomaly exists: the global fashion industry, which produces a huge variety of creative goods without strong IP protection. Copying is rampant as the orthodox account would predict."

Perhaps what you mean is that you can't claim that a knock-off is from one of the big names in fashion? Because it looks like people copy the designs frequently. Fashion, however, is partly about status, and people attribute status to brands. So even though if a design is similar, people may not value it as high simply because it doesn't have the "right" brand on it.

I actually agree with your point about "okay, so buy two good fonts instead of dozens of crappy ones' -- but I disagree there is little intrinsic utility in a high-quality 'premium' font.

A better font will make the work that uses it more readable and intelligible. It adds _utility_, not just beauty, to the text that uses it.

The next question is how you identify a better font, and if most $99 fonts are better than most free fonts or not. Certainly there are going to be some crappy $99 fonts, and perhaps a couple good free fonts, sure, the price isn't a guarantee.

App store games, music, etc. are vastly cheaper and hold more than their explicit production value. They provide entertainment, and to an extent, even an artform.

Because I like trying things on for size. And my mood changes. That's why I bought five different writing apps.

Well, I most certainly wouldn't. Mostly because I wouldn't buy dozens of them all at once, but over a period of weeks/years.

On the other hand, designers need to buy many different fonts since each client needs a unique brand – unless you're one of those designers that impresses your own brand on your clients.

It’s a combination of the attention to detail that goes into a professional-quality font and the sheer scale of the work, which is multiple orders of magnitude greater than writing a good smartphone app.

I wrote about this once before if you’re interested in a deeper explanation:

http://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/zaxs1/pick_y...

yet charge ~10$.

Games can be incredibly complex, you're underestimating

the amount of effort it takes to write one. You're also

assuming that he's selling his game on a mobile app store,

which may not be case (there's Steam, Desura, and other

online portals).

Sometimes you do see that quite directly. A font might be available as a basic version, probably with enough characters to set text in a few common Western languages but few frills, and a “professional” version, which might have a much larger character set, more support for OpenType features, or other enhancements.

There are other ways that pricing scales as well. For example, professional-grade fonts are almost always presented as part of a family, with different variations of weight (often far more than just regular vs. bold), style (roman/italic/slanted) and perhaps other characteristics. Buying a single font (just one style/weight variant) is usually disproportionately expensive, so most people would buy a bundle. An entry-level bundle might contain just a couple of weights and plain vs. italic versions of them, and those four variations might be more than enough for a lot of users. On the other hand, professionals typesetting a book or magazine would almost certainly want a wider typographical palette, and would therefore buy a more comprehensive bundle with perhaps dozens of different variations within just one font family. The price-per-font for both bundles might be about the same, but that means the comprehensive set is many times more expensive in absolute terms.

Another common means of scaling is that, like software, computer fonts tend to be licensed per device. That means someone buying one copy to use for a personal project will pay far less than a company of 500 people that wants to install a font for their new corporate look on every employee’s PC.

There is also the possibility of exclusivity. Some professional-grade fonts start life as a commissioned work for the exclusive use of a specific client, again usually as part of a branding exercise. Of course those clients will pay a premium for that work, which is far beyond the budget of most of us. In many cases they will only pay for exclusivity for a limited time, and the font’s creators can then add that font to their public catalogue for others to buy.

As a final example, with the rise of fonts-as-a-service on the Web, we now commonly see licensing based on page views, so large sites with many visitors are paying significantly more to the hosting service (though almost certainly at a lower cost per individual page view). Given that a major web site will receive orders of magnitude more hits than a typical personal blog or small company, that can make a big difference in how much a font service brings in if their fonts are chosen for major sites. As far as I’ve seen, the fonts themselves tend to be identical in these cases, though.

There are lots of dinosaurs in typography—Linotype etc—but the best studios are tiny. Some great links to great studios here: http://jessicahische.is/thinkingthoughts

Jesting aside, there are a handful of large foundries who are still behind the times somewhat. They're used to dealing with only a few clients (design agencies usually) and certainly not the web. A few have thankfully started coming around, especially thanks to work by TypeKit/Adobe. For example, HF&J now has a surprisingly good webfont service.

But unless you're going for something really specific (Proxima Nova, Whitney, etc.) you can very likely find a great similar font that is already open and even CDN'd by Google. (Though their browser is lousy.) https://www.google.com/fonts/

No if you spend years on an app! Seriously, developing a good type, from the idea to the final font files, is massive undertaking and can’t be compared to developing software. (I’m an experienced software developer and also a not-so-experienced type designer.)

They have a great collection.