Does a brand’s own font save money?

For a small or growing brand, no: buying a font once costs a fraction of having one made. At a big brand’s size, it can. And the famous saving was one sentence, taken back two days after it was printed.

Ebbi · 19 October 2026

The story goes like this: Netflix made its own font, and it saves the company millions.

It comes from one sentence. On 21 March 2018 the design magazine It’s Nice That wrote up Netflix Sans, the font Netflix had made with the type foundry Dalton Maag. Netflix’s brand design lead gave the reason: font licensing “can get quite expensive”, and the new font “saves the company millions of dollars a year as foundries move towards impression-based licensing for their typefaces in many digital advertising spaces.”

The same afternoon it was a headline. “Netflix’s sleek new typeface will save it a ton of money,” wrote The Next Web. The next day: “To Save Some Cash, Netflix Developed Its Own Font.”

On 23 March, two days after it was printed, the magazine took the millions out. The quote now ends at “an ownable and unique element for the brand’s aesthetic”; the line that licensing “can get quite expensive” stayed. At the foot of the page:

“An earlier version of this article quoted the designer as to the costs saved by using a bespoke font. We are currently seeking clarification on this statement.”

It still says that. I found no figure from Netflix itself: asked by PCMag, it “declined to offer any additional details”. The copies kept the millions. Each of the six I could still read says them today, one on a page dated 2024. When I asked a search engine this month why Netflix made its own font, it answered with the sentence. Asked whether the claim had been withdrawn, it “found no report” of it.

I met this story while I was drawing my own letters for this site, and wanted the bill behind it.

Two makers, two answers.

The type trade itself answers both ways.

Asked by The Next Web, Jonathan Hoefler, whose company Hoefler&Co made Gotham, the font Netflix was leaving, said the company had “never quoted a client anything close to a million dollars for anything”, and that “most of our clients find that they’re better served by licensing an existing font than creating a new one, and cost is a major factor in that decision.”

The maker of Netflix Sans had given the other answer years before. In 2010 the magazine Design Week reported Bruno Maag, of Dalton Maag, saying that a font made for a brand offers “a sure-fire – and often cheaper – solution to licensing concerns”.

Both sell fonts ready-made and made to order. So I set their words aside and read their prices.

The bill.

Both makers sell their fonts on their own sites, and both price them by how much a brand uses them: how many people install them, how many people see them, how many copies of an app carry them. Dalton Maag sells its own Aktiv Grotesk once: “Pay once, use forever.” Hoefler&Co sells Gotham to your computers once, and to your website by the year.

So I priced one brand at four sizes, on the steps their own price lists use, as each shop displayed them on 18 October 2026.

Four styles is a regular, an italic, a bold and a bold italic; Gotham 1 is the smallest Gotham family that holds them. Prices in US dollars, before tax.

Find your row.

Where it turns.

The only millions in this story that anyone can check are a price.

Nobody has shown the saving. IBM was reported in 2017 to have been spending “over a million dollars every year” to use Helvetica before it made its own font; no one at IBM was named saying so. The BBC expected its own to “save us a significant amount of money”; the sum went undisclosed. On Dalton Maag’s own site and on Monotype’s, 26 custom fonts are told as case studies. Two give cost as a reason. None gives a figure. No brand I found has published what its letters cost before and after.

The rent.

A price paid once stays put. A rent can move.

Hoefler&Co’s own licence calls the right to use Gotham on your computers “perpetual”. The website’s right lasts as long as the subscription: its web fonts are “available for purchase annually”, and a site that stays above its plan three months in a row must move up a tier.

And a rent can be re-priced. In 2025 the font company Monotype ended a yearly plan that Japanese game makers had used to put Japanese letters in their games. It had cost $380; the only alternative Monotype first offered cost $20,500 a year. After the outcry it brought the old plan back for a while, then revised it: the price to build the fonts into a game tripled, under a cap on copies sold that it did not disclose. The same year, a consultant who sells help with such bills wrote, for a printers’ association, that one licensee “was told that their new cost would be millions of dollars, 30 times what they had been paying”. No licensee is named. Like the millions of 2018, it is a number nobody has shown.

The maker of Netflix’s own font has gone the other way. In March 2026 Dalton Maag wrote that it sees “a font industry trend towards more restrictive clauses, more contractual exclusions, and increasingly opaque pricing”, and that “Every new retail licence is yours forever with no recurring fees.”

So what does a font you own outright buy, in money? A price nobody can raise later. A font bought once, from a maker who sells that way, buys the same.

And the cheapest letters are free. IKEA, in 2009, after fifty years in its own version of Futura, moved to Verdana, which Microsoft gave away: one font for every country and many alphabets, “more efficient and cost-effective”, in IKEA’s words.

At your size.

If your brand is small or growing, buy your letters once. A font of your own costs several times more, at a small brand’s size tens of times, and catches up with a rented font only after twelve years or more. If you want letters nobody else has, want them for that, not for the bill.

If you are big — a couple of hundred people, a million views a month, an app — ask for both prices. At your size a made font can cost less.

If you are a giant, the millions are real. What nobody has published is the saving.

Seen while makingMy own letters