Nov 6, 2026, 7:32 AMJust putting it out there: A yearly webfont license to the tune of a perpetual desktop license — especially now, in light of how bots inflate monthly views without benefit — is prohibitive for the majority, if not all, of the projects I work on and the people I work with.
Nov 6, 2026, 8:50 AMas an example, my internet rando personal website has, according to the server analytics offered by my webhost, over 20,000 unique monthly visitors. My #1 referrer is, thanks to what I must assume is a link in a CSS or JS comment, the American Ostheopatic College of Radiology: https://www.aocr.org/
@db That is, *if* your webfont license metric is traffic-based, like pageviews, or hits, or unique visitors.
@productiontype @db How is this generally measured? Number of page views in which the font is used, or number of downloads of the font? I would expect many bots to not download assets that are irrelevant for scraping such as fonts, so that distinction could matter.
Nov 6, 2026, 9:44 AM@justvanrossum Maybe @marsidesino has some insights here from reviewing the EULAs? I don’t remember seeing anything specific. I always assumed it’s according to whatever analytics solution you happen to be using. CDNs can mess with counting hits on webfonts, since I assume those numbers don’t reach your server, and I don’t know if the CDN keeps analytics on these things. One thing I loathe to get back to is vendor-mandated remote CSS/JS — self-hosting is a boon! @productiontype
@db PV/mo only works if you have remote CSS/JS. Otherwise it's either guesswork or super cumbersome. It's delusional to expect a client to provide accurate metrics (even company size sometimes!)
Nov 6, 2026, 9:32 AM@productiontype Yes, in part. But more than that, Production Type is not charging a web license comparable to desktop *per year*, is it? 😉 (or at least not at small company sizes I am used to working with)