One family, several products
- Desktop. Installs on a counted number of machines so designers can set artwork. It covers making the layout and says nothing whatsoever about how that layout reaches a reader.
- Web. Permits a browser to download the file, and is normally sold in traffic tiers or as a flat grant to self-host. This is the purchase a website needs, whoever drew the design.
- App and game. Embedding the outlines in software is licensed per title and sometimes per platform, and no amount of desktop seats reaches it.
- Ebook and PDF embedding. A document that carries the family inside it is a different permission from one that is only printed, which catches publishers far more often than designers.
- Broadcast and motion. Television, cinema and paid video advertising form their own tier at most foundries, priced against the size of the audience.
- Wordmarks. Several foundries want a separate grant before a licensed face is drawn into a registered mark, since a trademark outlives any seat count you bought it under.
The breach almost everyone commits is mechanical rather than greedy. A designer buys desktop seats, a developer finds the same file on the shared drive, and it gets uploaded to a server where browsers can fetch it. Nothing technical objects, which is exactly why nobody notices for years. A site needs a web grant, delivered either by self-hosting under terms that allow it or by letting the foundry serve the files from their own infrastructure. Self-hosting keeps the rendering path yours and leaves you responsible for staying inside the tier you bought. Foundry delivery removes the counting problem and inserts a third party your pages now wait on. Either route, the grant is held by a legal entity rather than by a domain, so a studio's purchase rarely covers a client's site once it is handed over. Put the remedy in the handover document: record family, foundry, grant type, tier and purchasing entity, then transfer where the terms permit it and have the client buy their own where they do not. Traffic tiers deserve a diary entry too, because the licence that fitted at launch stops fitting as the audience grows.
Open licences end the argument
Families under the SIL Open Font License, which covers most of what Google Fonts distributes alongside a minority under Apache 2.0, can be used commercially, embedded and self-hosted with no seats to count and no tier to outgrow. Two conditions are real: the font may not be sold on its own, and a Reserved Font Name obliges you to rename a modified version. Self-hosting an open family also keeps visitor IP addresses away from a third-party endpoint, which is the usual European reason for doing it.