Webfonts: The Licence Nobody Reads Until It's Too Late

There's a moment that happens in a lot of brand and web projects where someone asks: "Can we just use the same font on the website?"

And the answer — the technically correct answer, for the vast majority of commercial typefaces — is: not without a separate licence, no.

It's one of those things that sounds like it should be simple. You've already paid for the font. You use it in your documents, your presentations, your print work. So why on earth would the website be any different?

Because font licensing doesn't work the way most people assume it does. And webfonts sit right at the centre of that confusion.

What a webfont licence actually is When a font loads on a website, the font file is delivered to the visitor's browser. Every visitor. Every page load. The file is effectively being distributed — which, from a foundry's perspective, is an entirely different proposition to someone installing it on their laptop to design a brochure.

Foundries licence that right separately, and they almost always price it by traffic. The standard model uses monthly page view tiers — something like up to 250,000 views, up to 1 million, up to 5 million, and so on. The logic being that the more your site is visited, the wider the font is being distributed, and the fee scales to reflect that.

Some foundries offer perpetual webfont licences — pay once, use indefinitely. Others require annual renewals. The terms vary quite a bit, and they're not always clearly signposted when you're buying.

Self-hosting vs. a font service — they're not the same thing This is where a lot of people get caught out. There are two main ways webfonts end up on a site: served through a platform like Adobe Fonts, Fonts.com or the foundry's own CDN, or self-hosted — meaning the font files live on your own server.

If you're using a platform subscription, the webfont licence is usually bundled in. That's generally fine, as long as you keep the subscription active and you're actually licenced for the specific fonts you're using. The problem often surfaces when subscriptions lapse and nobody updates the site. The font keeps working — browsers cache things — but the licence has expired.

Self-hosting is more complicated. A surprising number of webfont licences don't permit self-hosting at all. Others allow it with restrictions: no serving via CDN, no use across multiple domains, specific file formats only. It's all in the EULA, and most people don't read the EULA until something goes wrong.

"Webfont licence" and "self-hosting licence" are not automatically the same thing. Check the terms before you assume they are. The page view problem Even when a webfont licence is properly in place, it can quietly become non-compliant over time. If your site grows — and hopefully it does — you may move up through traffic tiers without anyone realising the licence needs to be upgraded.

This is particularly common after a rebrand or a marketing push. Traffic spikes, the site performs well, and the font licence is the last thing anyone thinks to revisit. But most webfont EULAs are explicit about page view limits, and exceeding them — even unintentionally — puts you in breach.

It's worth building a periodic licence review into your standard web maintenance cycle, the same way you'd review a hosting contract or a software subscription.

What about Google Fonts? Google Fonts are free to use commercially, including on websites. The fonts are released under open licences — typically the SIL Open Font Licence — and the standard embed method is covered. If you're using Google Fonts correctly, you're fine.

The caveat is that not all free fonts are safe. There's a lot of noise online about "free font" downloads, and not all of those sites are distributing fonts with proper licence documentation. Some are redistributing commercial fonts without authorisation. "Free to download" and "free to use commercially on a website" are different things, and it's worth being clear on which one applies.

Agencies and the handoff problem One scenario that comes up regularly in web projects: the agency licenses the webfont during development, using their own account or a trial, and then hands the site over to the client without transferring the licence. The site goes live. The font works. Nobody checks.

The client is now running a live commercial website on a font they have no licence for. The agency, if they've been careful, has cancelled their trial or ended their access. The font may continue to render from a cached version, or via the CDN the agency used — until it doesn't.

If you're an agency, the cleanest approach is to ensure webfont licences are either purchased in the client's name from the outset, or formally transferred as part of the project handoff documentation. It protects you as much as it protects them.

How to know if you're covered The honest answer is: check your documentation. For every font in active use on your website, you should be able to point to a webfont licence that covers your current traffic volume, specifies your domain or hosting arrangement, and is either current or perpetual.

If you can't do that — or if you're not sure what the licence you have actually permits — it's worth getting it looked at properly. The exposure isn't usually catastrophic, but it's also entirely avoidable. And sorting it out before a foundry makes contact is always going to be a better position to be in than sorting it out after.