Most licensing questions we get are really one question: what are you making, and where will it go. Answer that plainly and the choice is usually obvious. Here is how we walk through it with a studio.
Start with where the type will be used
A desktop licence covers installed fonts on up to five computers in one company. Those computers can be used to set print, PDFs, images, logos and video. If the work leaves the studio as a printed book, a poster or a campaign film, desktop is the right starting point. A designer setting a book in Ashby Text needs nothing more.
A web licence is different. It covers self-hosting the WOFF2 files on your own sites, with up to 250,000 page views a month in total across them. That total is the part people miss. A family used on a main site and two campaign sites still shares one figure. If you expect more traffic, or cannot measure it with confidence, write to us before you buy.
An app licence covers embedding the fonts in one app on any platform. The files travel inside the app, so the licence is for the app, not for the design team's computers. If the same family is also used on the marketing site, that site needs its own licence or a desktop and web licence.
Desktop and web is the common choice for a studio that designs a brand and builds the site. It costs less than buying the two separately. For Sable Grotesk, desktop starts at £180, and the combined licence is the one most brand teams end up needing.
The other cases
Trial fonts sit outside all of this. They are for testing, mock-ups and pitches only, never published or final work. They are free on every family page, which means you can set a whole proposal before you decide. We would rather you did that than guess from a PDF.
The library is a separate arrangement. It is a recurring charge, monthly or yearly, with a download of every family and a desktop licence for as long as you subscribe. It is not a licence to keep the files after the plan ends, and fonts used in work made while you were subscribed stay licensed for that work.
If your situation does not fit any of this, email the studio. Larger teams, higher traffic, broadcast use and embedding in more than one app are all handled by a written quote. Tell us the family, the licence you think you need and what you are making. A short description is more useful than a long one.
A short way to decide
Run through these in order. It takes a minute and avoids most of the returns we see.
- List every place the type will appear: print, PDF, site, app, video.
- Count the computers that will have the fonts installed.
- Add up the monthly page views across all sites that will use them.
- Check whether the files will be embedded in an app or shipped as a download.
- If any answer is close to a limit, ask before ordering.
The licences page sets out the same points in a comparison table. Read it with your project in front of you, not in the abstract. If one line still does not fit, that is the line to ask us about.
