8 Places to Find Free Fonts for Commercial Use
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of websites offering free fonts, yet most of them use Creative Commons Licensing that doesn’t always include commercial use. If you run a small business or are a freelance creative and are looking for resources, that doesn’t help much. What will help is this list of websites that do offer free fonts for commercial use.
I have scoured the internet looking for websites that offer free fonts with specific commercial use rights granted to them. You can use any of the following on projects or to promote your own businesses without worrying about legal issues.
Google Fonts
Google Fonts allows commercial use of their huge font library so is the logical first place to look for any website or online project. All of the fonts use the Open Fonts License which grants unrestricted rights to use, modify, share or whatever. The font library itself is huge and at my count has 847 free fonts for use on web projects.
Google Fonts are served by Google themselves so all you do is link to them. It means you can change font on the fly and will always be using the latest version.
Font Squirrel
Despite the questionable name, Font Squirrel is another go-to place to find free fonts for commercial use. The site is huge and has thousands of fonts available. A good many of them are available for commercial use. There are some seriously attractive fonts on the site, I have bookmarked a couple myself for an upcoming eBook project so I’m sure you will find something here you like.
DaFont
DaFont is another fantastic repository of free fonts. More care is needed here as submissions use a mixture of licenses. Many are free for personal use while some are available for commercial use. Select a font and look above the download button on the right to see exactly what license is granted.
I know the authors are responsive on here so if you find something you really like that doesn’t have a specific commercial license, contact the font author and ask. It’s always worth a try for the right font.
Font Library
Font Library is another great repository of free fonts. There are thousands of them on here covering every type and style. The site uses a mixture of licenses including GNU General Public License and Open Fonts License so it is worth checking before you download. The license type is displayed just under the download button within each font’s page.
Font Library has the advantage of also featuring non-Latin character fonts on the site. This is immensely useful for anyone doing international projects. A designer friend of mine uses this to source Arabic characters for projects.
Downgraf
Downgraf is a site for designers and has featured a couple of pages containing a range of fonts for commercial use. One page of note is this one. It features some seriously good looking and very contemporary fonts that would look good on many websites. There are ‘only’ 21 fonts on the page but they are of such a high quality that I would be remiss for not featuring them here.
Behance
Behance is another design site with quite a range of fonts linked within it. This page has hundreds of fonts with commercial use granted within the license. Some of these are very good and some not so much. Like the other sites linked in this post, some filtering will be required to find the right font. That is made slightly more difficult on Behance by the fact you have to go into each one to see the font itself. Nevertheless, it is a resource well worth bookmarking if you often need new fonts.
MacAppWare
MacAppWare has an app that offers 679 free fonts for commercial use. If you use Mac and don’t mind using an app to source fonts, this might be worth a try. You do need to fill in a form with your name and email to gain access but with lots of disposable email addresses available, that shouldn’t be a barrier to accessing the fonts.
Design Your Way
Design Your Way has a page dedicated to commercial use fonts that features 41 examples of great design. This is another resource that prioritizes quality over quantity and there are some excellent fonts here. There is a good mix of styles including handwriting and some Nordic designs I have never seen before. This is definitely a site worth checking out for your next project.
So there are 8 places to find free fonts for commercial use. Got any others we should know about? Tell us about them below if you do!