Typophile

Pricing differences for Minion Pro Opticals

asdfhurz

Hi typohiles,

I'm considering buying the full Minion Pro Opticals font package. However, looking at offerings form different foundries, prices seem to differ quite drastically, e.g., Adobe wants 350,00 € while FontShop only charges 233 €.

So, what's the reason for such huge differences? Is it just competition or are there actual differences in the font quality/version/features? Or might it be due to different licensing conditions?

I hope someone can shed some light on this, since I really would not like to spend such money on a lower quality font or something like that...

Regards,
Hans

Sye Robertson

Minion is an Adobe Original, so it would be the same font on both sites AFAIK. I'll tweet Adobe Type and see if anyone responds.

Riccardo Sartori

It probably has to do firstly with conversion rates applied between $ (Adobe being american, etc.) and €, and tax calculation (for me, for example, FontShop price becomes € 284,26 after taxes).

asdfhurz

The 350 € Adobe price and the 233 € Fonts.com/FontShop/Linotype price is both excluding taxes, so this should not be the reason. I don't know how much of an issue currency conversion is, but this still seems like a rather large difference to me.

Riccardo Sartori

It looks like Adobe is applying the same premium price increase to european customers as they historically do for their software: the same fonts retails for just $299…
If for software programs the price increase could be justified by localisation costs, it looks completely arbitrary on fonts.

DavidL

For whatever it's worth, it should be the same fonts in both cases. FontShop gets its Adobe fonts through Monotype, and Adobe has supplied Monotype with the latest versions. (There was some delay on Monotype's end in shipping them, but with any luck they are now.)
The only difference should be in the license. Adobe has one of the more permissive licenses in the business, allowing commercial use, embedding for e-books & Flash, and modifications for private use - none of which are covered by Monotype's EULA. Neither EULA covers web font use.
Good luck!

asdfhurz

Thanks a lot for clarifying this.

Cheers,
Hans

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 27 Apr 2015. original URL