The buy vs build calculation is pretty easy. How much is the license for the rights you need? How much will a custom font cost to develop? Factor in how much do you value exclusivity vs how soon you need the font. If these figures come out to be about the same you can use them to negotiate a better license price from the foundry.

With respect to the "pay someone to make a clone font" question, unless the original design is in the public domain, very few (if any) self respecting type designers will make a clone for you.

So don't show the type designer the "original", just write a brief that describes exactly what you want, perhaps with some examples of a range of common typefaces that share some of the characteristics your looking for, eg. we want it to have serifs like... Nine times out of ten the results will be a better fit than the original.

There are indeed many variables! So many that it's
hard to imagine anybody offering a workable formula.

The math for the raw numbers is easy: for the cost of
the number of "seats" of the existing font(s) that you
need, can you get a quality custom solution instead?
Much harder is quantifying how much exclusivity* is
worth to you. Concerning which you might consider the
following useful twist: you can limit your exclusivity to
a number of years. This nicely lowers the cost without
overly damaging the brand since time dilutes the novelty
of a brand anyway.

* Which requires quite a bit of deviation from
an original; it might be better to simply start
from scratch, and only point out specific fonts
as sources of inspiration.

Do you already have type designers you like to work with?
If not, please do consider asking my foundry for a quote:
hpapazian at gmail dot com

hhp

Thanks this is very helpful.

I know it is hard to say what a custom typeface might cost - so let me rephrase... what ballpark are we in where licensing and custom design start to become comparable? I have no sense of this... $50K? $150K? More? Less?

(assuming custom design may be for fortune 500 size org, opentype, 10 year exclusivity, say 6 faces - light/reg/bold and obliques of each, kerning tables, hinting, etc.) Any thoughts?

{Edited.}

There are many reference points, but one I like to point
out was for a European wireless provider, a few years ago:
three weights of one design, large number of ligatures and
alternate glyphs, perpetual rights = $40-60K.

hhp

*You* made that typeface family, or someone else did? And in case of the latter: how did you find out about the fee?

No, I wish I'd done it!
If I tell you how I found out, will you hold it against me? :-)

{Second paragraph removed.}

hhp

Here's one example:

British Council Sans / £50,000 / Monotype Imaging / 2002

Source: http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/campaign/2008/06/freedom-of-info.html

Scope:
British Council Sans: available in eight weights for both Macintosh and PC platforms in Latin, Central European and Turkish. It is also available in four weights in Greek and Cyrillic.

http://www.britishcouncil-identity.org/downloads-fonts.htm

A big factor in the pricing will be the size of the glyph set. This is usually where we start from in working out a price, which also means that we tend to do a lot of work up front with a potential client, discussing their language support needs, typography layout feature sets, reading environments, etc.. This planning work helps us to provide detailed price quotes, so the client understands exactly what they are paying for.

[For the Brill fonts we spent almost two years gradually developing a plan with them before we got to the contract signing phase. It doesn't normally take that long, but their needs were very extensive and even before they came to use they'd spent a long time cataloguing all the typeforms in their publications. Each font ended up containing more than 5,000 glyphs.]

Did they pay anything for the pre-contract phase?

hhp

Another:
HMRC Modena / £11,765 exc VAT / FutureBrand / Miles Newlyn / 2007

(via http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/typefaces?unfold=1)

Modena? http://typophile.com/node/45498 :-)

Do I remember correctly that British Airways paid
Monotype $100K for their custom Mylius typeface?

hhp

No, I wish I'd done it!
If I tell you how I found out, will you hold it against me?
You can’t blame me for being curious when you talk about a Dutch company. Which one?

.

Paul, I'm sorry, I got an email from
my source saying the info is private.

I rarely withhold info to protect myself,
but I often have to do it to protect others.

hhp