How much does a custom brand typeface cost?
In Europe, the useful answer starts below a full typeface and extends well beyond €60,000. The fee depends on what must be designed, who may use it, which languages it supports and how thoroughly the final font is engineered and tested.
A fixed wordmark, a packaging alphabet and an installable multi-language variable family are different products. Asking for “a custom font price” without defining the object is like asking for the price of a building without saying whether it is a kiosk or a hospital.
Practical Twelve Moons scope ranges.
Current fonts, hierarchy, licences, language coverage, applications and a prioritised roadmap.
Typeface selection, hierarchy, roles, rules, templates and application tests.
Approved modifications or Baltic-language extension, subject to the original licence and foundry agreement.
One master, agreed Extended Latin set and selected brand or packaging applications.
Two masters or a variable system, 6–9 intended instances, Extended Latin, OpenType specification and broader testing. Larger scripts, rollout, exclusivity or full ownership can take a programme beyond €60,000.
These are orientation ranges excluding VAT, not universal quotes. A technical partner is included when the required production scope goes beyond the studio's verified role.
What changes the fee.
- Character set: basic Latin, Extended Latin, Cyrillic, Greek or other scripts.
- Masters and styles: one display master versus a variable family with meaningful axes.
- OpenType behaviour: alternates, ligatures, localisation, numerals and language-specific forms.
- Engineering: interpolation, kerning, hinting, file formats, build pipeline and QA.
- Applications: a fixed packaging system versus global brand, office, web and app rollout.
- Schedule and review: stakeholder groups, testing cycles and external language review.
Licence and ownership are separate decisions.
The default should be a clear licence covering the agreed organisation, channels, territory and duration. A full intellectual-property transfer removes future control and reuse from the designer, so it is priced materially higher—often around 1.75 to 2 times the otherwise comparable project.
Do not pay for “ownership” when the real requirement is a perpetual exclusive licence. Define modification rights, suppliers, subsidiaries, embedding, future character extensions and what happens when the organisation grows.
Published Western European benchmarks.
Berlin studio Supertype publishes examples of approximately €24,000 for a local-company three-font project and €53,250 for an international corporation with worldwide exclusivity. Type designer Jamie Clarke describes roughly £10,000–16,000 for a focused single-master Western European design fee, with licensing separate. Thomas Phinney places an established designer's four-style project broadly around $30,000–75,000 and notes the substantial premium for full ownership.
These references describe different scopes and cannot be compared as identical packages. They are useful because they show that a production-ready proprietary type system is normally a five-figure design and licensing programme.
Five inputs produce a credible quote.
- The names, texts and complete language list.
- The applications and smallest, longest or most technically difficult use.
- Required styles, weights, masters and future editing needs.
- Who must install, embed, modify and distribute the files.
- The launch date, review team and required technical handover.
If those inputs are still uncertain, begin with a brand typography audit rather than guessing the price of a full family.
Scope before style
Need a credible typography budget?
Send the required languages, applications, editing needs and launch date. We can identify whether the right first investment is an audit, an adaptation or custom work.
Discuss the scope