What Pro adds to your font
What each one actually changes on the page. Everything you write is kept on every account; these are about what your font file uses.
Your joins
The connections your hand makes between letters. With them, cursive writing flows the way you wrote it; without them, the letters sit as separate shapes with gaps where your pen never lifted.
This is the biggest one if your writing is joined-up. On a connected hand it is the difference between your handwriting and an alphabet of your letters.
Several forms of each letter
Your repeats stop being identical. Type letters or coffee and the two copies differ, because they came from two occasions you actually wrote that letter.
The eye notices identical repeats without knowing why, and reads the text as typed. This is the tell that removes it. Every version you keep rotates; rest one to keep it out of your words. Your a's: versions of a letter.
Spacing fitted to your hand
A Free font uses even, tidy spacing — every letter gets the same standard room, like a typewriter. Pro measures the room each letter actually needs from its own shape, sets word spacing to the rhythm of your real writing, and kerns the pairs that need to tuck closer than their widths suggest.
Quiet, but it is what stops finished text looking subtly loose — or subtly typed.
Letters that sit together
Your writing has its own small rises and falls, and its own size play between letters. Pro keeps those coherent the way they are inside your real words, so a line reads as one hand writing — not letters taken from different days.
The proof
After a build, the proof reads your font one character at a time and shows the ones worth a second look, in real words. Nothing changes unless you choose. On a Free account the notes and the room are part of Pro. More in What the proof does.
Accents, symbols and smart quotes
You can write them on any account, and they are kept. A Free account's font uses the everyday set: letters, digits and basic punctuation. A Pro font includes everything you wrote, accents, symbols, currency, brackets and smart quotes among them.
The web file and the ink image
Every account downloads the font file, which installs on Windows and Mac. Pro adds the web file for your own website, and the ink image, a picture of a line of your writing.
Fonts, saved fonts and resting fonts
A Free account keeps one font and one saved version of it. Pro keeps as many as you make. When a month of Pro ends, nothing is deleted: one font stays open, the others rest, and another month wakes them all.
Commercial rights
Free fonts are for personal use. Pro fonts may be used commercially — selling what you make, client work, business branding. Using your font commercially.
When the difference is worth it
Most worth it if your writing is joined-up or cursive, if you type long passages where repetition shows, or if you are selling anything you make with it.
Least worth it if you print in separate letters, and only need short pieces — a Free font is genuinely good for that, and we would rather say so.
Where it shows
The joins, the variation and the kerning all render in browsers, design tools, print and modern Microsoft Word. PowerPoint takes your letters and spacing but not the kerning, the joins or the variation, whatever the tier — PowerPoint, and what it can't do.
Current terms are on the pricing page.