Font licensing explained: can you use this font on your website or app?

An agent in Claude Code, Cursor, Lovable or v0 will cheerfully drop any font file into public/fonts/ without ever asking whether you are allowed to serve it. This guide walks through what font licenses actually control, how the widespread ones work, and how to review a project before it goes live.

This is not legal advice. What follows summarizes published license texts and vendor terms. For a real product, read the license yourself and, when the stakes are high, talk to a lawyer.

What a font license controls

Buying a font really means buying permission to use a file in particular ways. Commercial licenses split that permission into separate uses:

• Desktop: install the font on a computer and work with it in Figma, Photoshop or Word to produce documents and static images.
• Webfont: serve the font file from a web server and load it via @font-face, so the browser renders live text with it.
• App: embed the font file inside a mobile or desktop application.
• Electronic documents: embed the font in an ebook or an interactive PDF.
• Logo: since a logo is normally an image, the font file never ships, and vendors often count this as desktop use.

Commercial webfont licenses frequently come with limits on domain and pageviews per month, which means the license covering your landing page might not stretch to your second site or to next year's traffic.

The SIL Open Font License 1.1

The SIL Open Font License (OFL) is the license you will meet most often among free fonts.

What you may do. The license grants permission "to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify, redistribute, and sell modified and unmodified copies of the Font Software." Commercial websites, apps and client work all fall under that. Fonts may be "bundled, redistributed and/or sold with any software."

What you may not do.

• You cannot sell the font by itself. "Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components, in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself." Selling a template, theme or app that happens to include the font is fine.
• You cannot relicense the font. The font and everything derived from it "must be distributed entirely under this license." Your website, your app and your designs stay untouched: "The requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply to any document created using the Font Software."

What you must do. Every copy you distribute has to carry the copyright notice and the license, either as a text file like OFL.txt or inside the font's metadata. Serving a webfont already counts as distribution.

Reserved Font Names. Authors may reserve names right after the copyright line, and no modified version may use them without written permission. The OFL FAQ treats subsetting a webfont as a modification. So when your font's license lists a Reserved Font Name and you subset the file, your version needs a different family name.

Credit and logos. According to the OFL FAQ, logos and other design work require neither extra permission nor acknowledgement.

Apache 2.0 fonts

A number of fonts are released under the Apache License 2.0, a general software license; on Google Fonts, Roboto Slab and Permanent Marker are two examples. Commercial use is allowed. Redistributing the font obliges you to include a copy of the license, keep existing copyright and attribution notices, mark any files you changed, and pass along the notices from a NOTICE file when one exists. In contrast to the OFL, nothing in it forbids selling the font on its own.

Google Fonts and commercial use

The Google Fonts FAQ answers the most searched question without hedging: "Yes, you can use them commercially, and even include them within a product that is sold commercially." Every font there is open source; most carry the OFL, while some use Apache 2.0 or the Ubuntu Font License. The FAQ also green-lights logos, apps and websites. The exact conditions sit in each font's license file, either in the download or in the google/fonts repository on GitHub.

A different question is where the file loads from: fonts served by Google's servers make your visitors' browsers contact Google. See self-hosting web fonts for why that matters in the EU.

Commercial fonts and typical license models

Fonts bought from foundries and marketplaces arrive with an End User License Agreement (EULA), and every foundry writes its own. MyFonts, to pick one example, sells separate licenses for desktop, webfont, mobile app, digital ads and electronic documents. Desktop licenses are counted per user, webfont licenses cover one domain and are usually priced by monthly pageviews, and electronic document licenses count publications. For a static logo image, MyFonts names a desktop license as the minimum.

Put differently: a desktop license never places the file on your server, and a webfont license for one domain does not stretch to a second site.

System and platform fonts: why not SF Pro?

Fonts bundled with an operating system are licensed for that system, not for your server.

Apple's license for the San Francisco fonts, published alongside the SF Pro download, states you may use the font "solely for creating mock-ups of user interfaces to be used in software products running on Apple's iOS, OS X or tvOS operating systems." It goes on: "You may not embed the Apple Font in any software programs or other products," and you may not use it to "create, develop, display or otherwise distribute any documentation, artwork, website content or any other work product." Copying the SF Pro files into a web project is not covered.

Microsoft's font FAQ says the same thing about Windows fonts: no copying them to a web server, no converting them to WOFF or WOFF2. What does work is naming the system font in CSS, so the visitor's device renders its own copy; Microsoft says publishers are free to list Windows fonts in a font stack. WebKit documents -apple-system as the way to get San Francisco on Apple devices:

body {
  font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", sans-serif;
}

Adobe Fonts on the web

Adobe Fonts is part of Creative Cloud plans. On websites you link a web project and Adobe serves the fonts for you. The terms say:

• No self-hosting. Hosting the fonts "on your own server or other self-hosting option" is prohibited.
• Tied to your plan. The license runs "only for as long as you maintain an uninterrupted Adobe Subscription Plan." Per Adobe's help pages, sites fall back to the next font in your stack once the subscription ends.
• Clients need their own plan. Publishers you build sites for "must purchase their own subscription" if they want to keep using the fonts after the site is finished.
• No modifications or format conversions of the font files.

Adobe's help pages state there is no monthly pageview limit.

Checklist before a font goes live

• Where did the file come from? The foundry, Google Fonts or the author's repository, never a "free fonts" mirror.
• Which license applies? Locate the license file or the license fields inside the font. No license means no permission.
• Does it cover your use? For commercial fonts, website, app, ebook and logo are separate questions, and webfont licenses name domains and traffic.
• Did you modify the file? Subsetting or renaming can trigger conditions like Reserved Font Names.
• Is the license text shipped with the font? With OFL and Apache 2.0 this is a condition, not a courtesy.
• Who holds the license? For client work, check whether the client needs one of its own, as Adobe Fonts requires.

Keep license files next to the fonts

Store each license where anyone will see it, your agent included:

public/
  fonts/
    inter/
      inter-400.woff2
      inter-700.woff2
      OFL.txt
    roboto-slab/
      roboto-slab-variable.woff2
      LICENSE.txt
FONTS.md

In FONTS.md, list every family with its source, license and license file, and for commercial fonts add the order number, domains and pageview tier.

Font files also store license information internally. This script prints it using fonttools (pip install fonttools brotli):

import sys
from fontTools.ttLib import TTFont

for path in sys.argv[1:]:
    name = TTFont(path)["name"]
    print(path)
    for label, name_id in [("Family", 1), ("Copyright", 0), ("License", 13), ("License URL", 14)]:
        print(f"  {label}: {name.getDebugName(name_id)}")

Run it with python3 fontinfo.py public/fonts/*/*.woff2. Empty license fields do not mean the font is free.

Let your agent audit your fonts

The tedious part is something your agent can take over:

Prompt for your agent

List every font this project uses: @font-face files, font packages, Google Fonts or Adobe Fonts links, next/font imports and system font stacks. For each, give the source, the license (from license files or name table IDs 0, 13 and 14) and whether our use (web, app, logo) looks covered. Flag fonts without a license, operating system fonts copied into the project, and self-hosted Adobe Fonts. Write the result to FONTS.md and change no font files.

Read the result yourself though: an agent can quote licenses, but deciding whether a commercial EULA covers your case is beyond it.

Questions people ask about font licenses

Can I use Google Fonts commercially? Yes, Google's FAQ says so, even inside a product you sell. When you host the font yourself, keep the license file with it.

Do I have to credit an OFL font on my website? No visible credit is required. The copyright notice and license have to travel with the font files, for instance as OFL.txt next to them.

Can I use SF Pro on my website? Not as a hosted webfont: Apple's license restricts it to interface mockups and excludes website content. A system-ui or -apple-system font stack lets Apple devices render their own copy.

Is a free font always free for commercial use? No. Some fonts are offered free for personal use only. The license text alone tells you.

Can I host Adobe Fonts myself? No. Adobe's terms prohibit self-hosting; the fonts are served through your web project for as long as your subscription runs.

A typeface built for your project

A font created for your project raises the very same questions: who may use it, where, and under which terms. That is what we are building at MakeFont: your agent designs a typeface for your project and hands it over as files you host like any other font. MakeFont is in development, and the license terms for MakeFont fonts will be set before launch; until then we make no promises about them. Early access is open, and What is MakeFont explains the idea.