Shopping Around for Fonts

As you very well know, there’s no shortage of design-related online shops for you to purchase assets from.

But here’s a question for you: should you shop around? Do the prices of identical assets differ between marketplaces?

There’s an easy answer to this question and it’s ‘Yes, definitely.’ I had long noticed that most typefaces are usually cheaper to buy on Creative Market compared to, for example, MyFonts. Most of the time, the differences in price are minimal (in the range of a few dollars) but sometimes there are considerable savings to be had by going for one marketplace over the other.

I only bring this up today because of an experience I had over the weekend: I wanted to purchase a font called Sunshine Daisies for a book cover project I have coming up so I went to my default marketplace: Creative Market. The price over there? The desktop license (which is the cheapest option) costs $89. Add VAT to that and the price goes up to $105. I mean, I’ve purchased more expensive fonts than that but maybe I could find it cheaper somewhere else?

So off I went to MyFonts.com in search of greener pastures. I wasn’t disappointed. The price was in the same ballpark but at least I could buy the styles I wanted separately for €7.99 each. Of course, I wanted ALL THE STYLES, so I was back to round one.

Almost defeated but not quite, I decided to go to Design Cuts and try my luck there. And what can I say other than SPECTACULAR SUCCESS! For $27 plus VAT I could buy all the Sunshine Daisies I wanted and then some. And in case you’re wondering, their licensing is as permissive as the rest of the marketplaces.

The point of this post? Don’t be too lazy to shop around. You never know what you’ll come across.