The philosophy behind family packs
As most font families include many different single styles, fonts are also sold as complete family packs. It’s a natural and common way of grouping fonts, and comes in handy when there are different weights and widths of fonts. The price you set for your family pack creates a great opportunity to upsell your fonts. Strategically pricing your family pack can entice customers to buy the complete pack rather than a single style, thus spending more money with your foundry. You want customers to buy your complete family pack, because it’s more likely they’ll use the fonts (and create the best work possible with your fonts) if they have all the styles you’ve thoughtfully designed to work together. The more your fonts are used by designers, the more places people see them, and the more popular they become, thus creating even more demand for your fonts.
Pricing complete family packs
We recommend pricing family packs between 3x and 10x the price of a single style. Many foundries have different strategies for this, and you can check out MyFonts.com to see what other foundries are doing. We see common price points of $49, $99, $149, and $199 working well for complete family packs.
Each year we conduct the Font Purchasing Habits Survey where we ask font users about their purchasing habits. We ask two questions about font prices people are willing to pay for two different categories of fonts. The questions and results are below.
Workhorse family
Imagine you want to purchase a typeface family that will be your go-to font for a variety of typographic uses - set in large and small sizes in documents, presentations, and more. It's probably either a sans or serif category, with many weights, italics, obliques, small caps, language support, and OpenType features. When asked what respondents would pay for a basic desktop license for a complete family, the average answer was $118USD in 2018.
Script family
Imagine a three-weight family of script typefaces. All of the letters connect smoothly, there are many alternates and ligatures, it contains well-designed diacritics, and it comes in three weights. When asked what respondents would pay for a basic desktop license of this family of three fonts, the average answer in 2018 was $55USD in 2018.
It’s great to get feedback from real customers about prices willing to pay. Keep in mind that these numbers should only be used as a guide when pricing your family packs. There are many strategies that work, so feel free to experiment and research. You can read more about the Font Purchasing Habits Survey research here.
Sub-family packs
You can also create a sub family pack that includes fewer font styles than the complete family pack. We only recommend this for font families that contain a very high volume of styles. We also recommend creating no more than three sub-family packs. Too many options can overwhelm customers. We make this recommendation based on user research conducted during our family page redesign.