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With Adobe CC I've gained access to Typekit. I've started playing around with it and noticed they put a cap on page views per month on loading the fonts. (Currently I'm capped at 500,000 but would need 5,000,000+). I assume this is due to bandwidth use, or perhaps it's due to foundry licensing. I understand I could upgrade my plan to increase the number of page views, but I'm wondering if I could host the font myself.

Would I be allowed to download a Typekit font (such as the one I have on my desktop) and upload that font to my web server and then embed it myself, rather than going through the Typekit service? Or is this breaching any agreement?

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My understanding is No.

The page view cap is there to gain further money for Adobe if you need more page views. It has absolutely nothing to do with bandwidth or foundry licensing. Adobe has plenty of servers and bandwidth to serve everything and they are the foundry.

Adobe would see embedding a Typekit font, with anything other than their own embed code, as piracy and circumventing their licensing fees.

This is one reason I refuse to use Typekit and actually purchase my fonts with the licenses I need. That, and the fact that if the subscription were to lapse, all the web sites you build with Typekit fonts will stop using those fonts.

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  • Thanks Scott, just came to this conclusion myself. Seems like it's best to seek out licenses that I need directly from the font foundry.
    – Hanna
    Jul 24, 2014 at 16:52
  • This is correct. Typekit's business model is all about hosting the files for you. HOSTING is actually the service they are providing.
    – DA01
    Jul 24, 2014 at 17:03
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I did some more research on licensing and came across the following:

Can I use Typekit web fonts for anything other than a website?

No. Our web font license requires that the fonts be added to a website with the Typekit embed code. If the website or web app is viewed in the browser (either on the desktop or on a mobile device), it's covered by the web fonts license.

You can’t use web fonts to generate images for offline use. You may, however, use fonts synced from Typekit to create web mockups and generate images for use on your website.

Source

So I suppose this answers my question -- you cannot manually embed fonts onto your site, you must use their embed code.

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