How to sell a font you made

Get the font ready to sell

People who buy fonts will type things you never thought of. Before you list anything, go through the whole character set: every capital, every lowercase letter, the numbers, punctuation and accented letters. Look hardest at the ones that break first, like lowercase g and a, capital R and S, the ampersand and the question mark.

Then fix the spacing. Kerning pairs like AV, To, LT and Ty leave holes in most fonts until someone tunes them. Set real words, at the sizes people will use them: a brand name, a headline, a price, a paragraph if it’s a text face. An alphabet line won’t show you what a word does.

Last, the name. Search it before you commit. If another font, or a well known brand in your space, already uses it, pick another. Renaming a font after people have bought it is a mess for everyone. If the font is going to matter to your business, ask a lawyer about trademarking the name, since the name is often easier to protect than the letter shapes.

What goes in the download

• OTF and TTF for desktop use. Some buyers’ software wants one, some the other. The OTF vs TTF vs WOFF2 guide explains why.
• WOFF2 for buyers with a web license, so they can put it on their site without converting anything.
• The license as a text or PDF file, with the font name, your name and how to reach you.
• A specimen PDF showing every style and the full character set. Buyers keep it for reference, and it saves you emails asking whether the font has a certain glyph.

Name the files clearly, like YourFont-Bold.otf, and fill in the font’s own name fields so it shows up as one family in design apps instead of six loose fonts.

Write a font license for selling

Your license, sometimes called an EULA, is what the buyer is actually paying for. Most foundries split it by use, and buyers are used to that:

• Desktop, per computer. Installing the font and making things with it: print, logos, merch, images, documents.
• Web, by traffic. Serving the WOFF2 on a website. Say whether you count monthly visitors or pageviews, and whether the limit is per site or across all their sites.
• App, per title. The font built into an app or game.

Then say what buyers can’t do. The usual list: share the font files, resell them, sell modified copies, or put the font in a product where other people type their own text, like an editable template, without a separate license. Many foundries now also rule out using the files to train AI. Say whether a buyer can hand their license to a client, and whether licenses expire.

Keep it short and plain. If a buyer can’t tell from your license whether their use is allowed, they’ll email you, or buy something else. Our font licenses guide walks through each type in more detail. This is general information, not legal advice, and for a font that earns real money it’s worth having a lawyer read your license once.

How to price a font

Start with what similar fonts sell for where you plan to sell. Look at fonts with a similar number of styles and a similar level of finish, not the most famous ones. Price inside that range. Very cheap can make a font look unfinished, and a high price needs a big family and a track record behind it.

A few patterns most sellers follow:

• Price per style, and discount the family. Someone who wants one bold weight pays for one. The whole family costs less than buying every style one by one, which gets people to take all of it.
• Price the license by size. One computer costs less than five. A small site costs less than a busy one. App licenses usually cost the most.
• Let buyers upgrade. If a client’s site grows past its web license, letting them pay the difference keeps them yours.

Launch discounts work well for a new font. Give it a clear end date, and put the regular price next to it so the discount means something.

Where to sell fonts online

Your own site

Selling from your own site means you set the prices, write the license, keep the buyer’s email and decide how the font is shown. You need a payment provider and a way to deliver the files after payment. Some simple digital product shops do both. The catch is traffic: nobody finds your site by accident, so you’re doing all the promotion yourself.

Marketplaces

Marketplaces bring buyers who are already looking for fonts. Creative Market and MyFonts are built around design assets and type. Etsy has a big audience for display and craft fonts. Gumroad is closer to running your own store, with less built in traffic. Each one sets its own rules: the share of every sale it keeps, whether it requires its own license or lets you use yours, whether you can sell the same font elsewhere, and what it needs from your files and product images. Those terms change, so read each one’s current seller terms before you sign up.

Plenty of sellers do both. Marketplaces bring in the first buyers, and the font’s page on your own site becomes the place people land when they go looking for you.

Product pages that sell fonts

Buyers decide from images. Show the font in use: on a poster, a label, a shirt, a screen. Set real words in it, the kind of words your buyer will set, not the alphabet and not lorem ipsum. Show every style together so people can see the range they’re paying for, and include a character set image so they can check for the glyphs they need.

In the description, say what the font is good for, list the styles and formats in the download, and link to the license. Leave out what every font page says. A buyer wants to know if it will work for their job.

Selling a font you made in Letterhead

Fonts you make in the editor can be sold on a paid plan. One Custom Font ($29 once) covers one font family. Pro ($12 a month or $96 a year) and Founding ($149 once, first 149 people) cover as many as you make. You can license them to others and sell them, including selling the font files themselves.

Free downloads are for personal, noncommercial use, and the file says so. To sell a font you started on Free, upgrade and download it again. The new download carries the commercial license and adds TTF and WOFF2 to the OTF.

Every download carries a short note in its file information: “Made with Letterhead.” Keep that note in the files you sell, and include the line “Made with Letterhead” in the license you give buyers. You don’t need it in your product descriptions, your sales pages or the designs people make with the font.

Two more rules to know:

• It has to be your design. Letterhead sells its own typefaces ready made, so the editor only downloads fonts that have been changed enough from them to count as your own.
• Letterhead Editorial stays open. It’s based on Spectral by Production Type, so fonts made from it stay under the SIL Open Font License. You can use and share them, commercial work included, but you can’t sell the font files on their own.

The full wording is in our Terms. If you haven’t made your font yet, start with how to make your own font.