I did my first design work at seventeen, and I’ve been working in the design field ever since. I’ve always been a typography champion — that guy who, starting a new project, says “hey, let’s buy a cool font!”, and the same guy who then cares the most about following the foundry’s license agreement. I’m proud that I always did the right thing. But I have something to confess: it was such a nightmare.
I once worked at a fast-growing startup. We bought a web license with about a dozen tiers inside — you know the type: 10K page views a month, 25K, 100K, and so on. And since we were, as I said, fast-growing, every month we hit another bar on web traffic. So every month I asked my client for the page-view count and went to update the license tier accordingly. I can’t say my client was happy. And I was annoyed as hell.
When I started Yep!, I used that experience and also did proper customer development. As a result, I discovered a pain that now seems obvious — one that font customers everywhere share: the font can cause you problems.
Just think about it. You pay for a typeface, and from that moment on you’re never quite safe. A colleague sends the font over email to another colleague, and now you’ve exceeded your desktop license seats. Your traffic jumps overnight, you need a higher tier, and you don’t notice. You took your brand font and printed a billboard? Used it in a mobile app? All without the proper license? Big mistake. Even if you never violate the license on purpose, the fact is you’re always under some legal risk. I’m not exaggerating, even if it sounds like it — just look up Font Bureau v. NBCUniversal (~$2M claim).
Yes, foundries don’t really aim to sue everyone, and most prefer to settle such matters amicably. But I’d still be uncomfortable discovering that I had accidentally put my company in a position where a court situation was even possible.
This is why the Yep! Type Foundry licensing model is so transparent, friendly, and straightforward: I simply wanted a license that wouldn’t be a pain in the ass for me as a designer.
So, using the insights from my customer development (I’m from the startup world, remember?), I decided my foundry would stand on three pillars:
- A font license should never cause consequent harm or burden.
- Customers should have one simple parameter to pick their tier.
- A font should be affordable for individuals and small companies, while charging full price to enterprises.
Think of them as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, but for fonts.
And one more pillar, an internal one: the license should add as little extra work for the foundry as possible. I’m a solo founder — I don’t want to spend my time checking whether customers stay within their license tiers.
Here’s how those pillars became the actual Yep! Type license. Say you’ve bought Innovator Grotesk or Unifora for your company — here’s what that means:
- No desktop license to track, so you can share the font across your company without the risk of exceeding desktop seats.
- No webfont license, so even if your website hits 1M page views — good for you, no need to adjust the tier.
- No app license, so you can publish a mobile app for iOS and Android with no install count to worry about. Focus on your business, not on the font.
- No digital ad license, so there’s no limit on using the fonts in emails and digital ads.
- No ePub license — use Yep! Type fonts in PDFs and any commercial publication.
- No server license, so you can run the fonts on your company platforms and your own CMS.
- No print license — print a book, a billboard across the whole country, or use the font in the subway.
Picking your tier is just as simple: the only thing to choose is your current company size. Choose from the available tiers and pay accordingly — and you pay once. Even if your company grows next month, you owe me nothing. No consequent harm, remember? Think of it as a good investment. The pricing is transparent, too: a single style starts at just €10 for the Startup tier.
The single exception is creative software embedding. If you’re building something like Canva, Figma, or CapCut — any app that lets users create their own materials or print from templates — and you want Innovator Grotesk or Unifora available inside it, you’ll need a special license.
I’m proud of how simple such a complex thing as a font license turned out to be. And, more important — zero legal risk.
To read the full license, including terms for Trial use and creative software embedding, see the EULA.
This is a true win-win. Yep! customers get a transparent, friendly, no-consequent-harm license. And I, in turn, don’t have to annoy anyone by verifying whether they’re staying within a license tier.