I make websites for a living. If you make websites for a living, sooner or later, you’ll have to deal with web fonts. Yes, you can technically avoid them by going down the system fonts route, but designers love their fancy typefaces. And I don’t blame them. Some of them are great, even though a part of me is happy that I can just default on Inter every time I need a sans. But I digress, this is not a discussion about typefaces, it’s a discussion about web font licenses.

I paid for typefaces in the past. I used Maison Neue on an old version of this website. Lovely typeface. Would I ever consider using it again? Hell no. Why? Money. How much would it cost to bring back the lovely Maison Neue? Let’s see… I’d need at least 3 separate fonts—a regular, a bold, and an italic—plus a monospaced version since I do have bits of code here and there. That would cost me 400€. And to be fair to Milieu Grotesque, at least it’s