GlyphForge — Type Foundry & Font Licensing Command Center

Drawn once. Licensed forever.

GlyphForge is a complete, private, 100% offline operating system for an independent type foundry — the drawing, the licensing, the distributors, the commissions and the back catalogue. 15 integrated modules and 39 tools in a single HTML file, plus a live 11-sheet Excel workbook. Nothing installs. No account. No family, price or client name ever leaves your computer.

A product priced like a download and built like a building

Everybody in type knows a typeface takes a year and sells for forty dollars. Almost nobody has done the division, because doing it means writing down how many hours actually went in.

GlyphForge does the division. In the worked example inside — a two-person foundry, nine released families, 12,040 hours at the drawing board — an hour of retail work has returned $39.14. The same hour sold as a commission returned $87.92. Neither number is wrong and the difference is not that retail is worse: it is that retail keeps paying, and at the decay your own catalogue shows it takes thirteen years for a retail hour to catch up. That is the whole trade, and this is the only place it gets stated as a number.

The four phases nobody counts

Ask anybody how long a typeface takes and they describe sketching, the roman and the italic. Those are 44% of the work. Diacritics, spacing and kerning, hinting and production, and testing are 34% — four thousand hours across nine families, invisible in every specimen and absent from every estimate anybody has ever given a client. The phase table is also the only reliable way to turn “five weights with italics and Cyrillic” into a number of hours you will not regret quoting.

The distributor tax, priced rather than argued about

Half of every licence, in exchange for the only traffic that exists. GlyphForge prices both halves. It works out exactly what replacing your biggest distributor would take — in sales, and then in specimen views, using the view-to-sale rate rather than the trial conversion rate, which is roughly ten times larger and is how most direct-sales plans get sold to foundries.

Twenty-one screens

The work — Typeface Register · The Hours In A Typeface (the flagship: hours against earnings, with payback read off one curve for every family) · Where The Hours Went, ten phases · Language & Script Cover, with the cost of every gap.

Licensing — The Licence Matrix, six tiers metered in six different units and deliberately never compared to each other · What A Licence Is Worth, where a price rise is exact arithmetic with no elasticity assumed · Renewals & Upgrades · Unlicensed Use, where the estimated value of a licence nobody bought never once becomes revenue.

Selling it — The Distributor Tax · Selling It Yourself · Superfamilies & Bundles, with displacement priced from an assumption you set · Trials & Specimens, counting only the sales a specimen page can honestly claim.

The business — Custom & Exclusive Work, hour for hour against retail with exclusivity subtracted · Release Cadence, and what your own target commits you to in weeks · The Back Catalogue, where the decay rate is fitted from your own families and the fit quality is printed next to the answer · Who Buys Them.

Eight calculators

What a typeface cost · The distributor tax · Price a licence tier · Superfamily against singles · Quote a commission · One more script · Chasing unlicensed use · What the catalogue earns. Every one opens with your own figures already in it, and there is a button on each tab to reload them.

Twelve copy-ready pieces

Quoting a studio that has grown · refusing a discount without sounding mean · the trial reply · the renewal note · the gentle chase on a lapsed licence · the first unlicensed-use letter, written on the assumption it was an accident · the second one · the custom quote with exclusivity priced in it · why the second half takes longer · the plain-English summary that goes on top of a EULA · the upgrade note · the release announcement.

What you get

• GlyphForge-Type-Foundry-Font-Licensing-Command-Center.html — the whole application, one file, offline
• GlyphForge-Companion-Workbook.xlsx — 11 live formula-driven sheets
• Quick-Start-Guide.html — eight steps to your first real number
• How-To-Use-Guide.html — the full manual, screen by screen
• README.txt and LICENSE.txt

Genuinely private. It makes no network requests of any kind. Your families, prices, clients and licence ledger stay in your own browser and are never transmitted anywhere.

Honest by design. The estimated value of a licence somebody did not buy appears on one screen and is never added to revenue. A lapsed renewal is not claimed back in full — it is discounted to the lift that chasing has actually produced in your own ledger, and if that lift is zero the figure is zero. The catalogue decay is a least-squares fit across your own families with the r-squared printed beside it, and a weak fit gets a warning box rather than a footnote. Money already lost, money worth going after and money still in the pipeline are three separate lists with three separate totals, and they are never added together.

GlyphForge performs arithmetic on figures you supply. It is not legal, tax, accounting or contractual advice. Type design law differs sharply by country — in the United States a typeface design as such is generally not protected by copyright while the font software is, and much of Europe treats the design itself very differently. Licence agreements, distributor contracts and correspondence about unlicensed use are matters to take proper advice on rather than to settle from a template.