fortawesome

I just looked over the plans page, and I didn’t see anything. Can you screenshot the false claims for me? Would love to get that fixed up.

Sorry about this. The amount of engineering required is pretty high for making downgrade work, and we’re a small team. With limited time for new work, we end up prioritizing new features over making downgrade easy. (I’ll be honest, it’s always bothered us that downgrade isn’t self-serve.)

I’ll chat with the team and see if we can prioritize a long term solution (we just recently had new ideas for how to do this more simply). In the meantime, we might be able to figure something out for you. Feel free to hit me up directly if you need.

Cory's announcement: https://www.abeautifulsite.net/posts/the-future-of-shoelace/

Not sure on the 1000/visitors/site/day. But we're also on some pretty big sites as well. IIRC, the final number there is higher than what MaxCDN (BootstrapCDN folks) serves. Not by much though. Within an order of magnitude I think (which is pretty accurate for this kind of guesswork).

73 million sites comes from our friends at Meanpath (their search engine isn't running anymore, sadly). They showed us on 7.3% of websites. Best guess is there are about a billion sites on the internet. Thus, 73 million.

(Oh and FA5 Pro CDN will allow loading just the icon categories you need. And for real granular control, FA5 Pro includes a desktop subsetter for all backers too.)

Edit: Fixed wording for clarity.

This is a great article. Some of these are already on the agenda for FA5, but there's some new stuff there for us too. We'll dig in and it's a TODO on the FA5 roadmap now. :)

Another thing I'm super excited about is stray points in vectors. We found some new tools for Illustrator that make this a LOT easier and will have a very real impact on bandwidth as well.

Super fun.

If you are willing to accept a bit more advice: Don't rely on that.

We aren't entirely. But we've had 15 million folks on Font Awesome in the past year. Not all of them have seen the Kickstarter, so we're hoping some of them will buy. Other plans too. Definitely not relying solely on this, but we're going to take Font Awesome Pro everywhere we can.

I remember reading somewhere that 8% of what the Kickstarter made per month is somewhat normal. Time will tell though. But it's a good lead for us to try and see what happens.

So don't rely on that, add something new.

Agreed.

Thanks. I hope you don't feel like I was insulting you, because that was not my intent (although it seems some people thought it was).

I'll be honest, it came off a bit gruff. But I've learned that often goes along with folks that know what they're talking about. (And the 20k karma here helps you out too.)

Again, thanks. I take the livelihoods of 4 families seriously. We'll do what we can to keep making things better.

We posted the info he's referencing elsewhere in the thread. We're used on roughly 1 in every 3 new websites that gets made.

They can always gift it to another student. :)

Yeah, it shouldn't be confusing! We extended early backer pricing for the whole Kickstarter, so the Personal / SMB license would have been $40.

Only difference is who can use the license. Student license is for students only. But I'm recommending students just get the full Personal / SMB license since it's more flexible in the end and a better price.

(Non-profits should ABSOLUTELY get the Student / NP license as it's good for any organization size and just $20).

They're back! Was just a hiccup. :)

Three things come to mind right away that seems like contributed to folks pulling the trigger and buying:

1. Pent up good will from using Font Awesome over the past 4 years.

2. The product was something folks actually wanted and the price was a great value.

3. A video that makes folks laugh. Even if just a bit.

I've always thought this article was reasonable: https://benfrain.com/seriously-use-icon-fonts/

Please be extremely frugal with your money.

We are and will continue to be so. Two of us are sharing a 100 square foot office that we're subletting from a bigger startup. The other two of us work from home. We have no interest in flashy office space or things that won't help us get more done. With age sometimes comes maturity, and I think we're pretty pragmatic.

If you can budget no more than $100K per year, you'll keep your company alive for a long time.

It's four of us, all very, very senior with family responsibilities. $100k isn't in the cards. But I don't think it needs to be. There's a chance that folks will buy Font Awesome Pro after the Kickstarter is over, so we're going to try that.

Also, this team is absurdly talented. We're told repeatedly that we're the only team at our stage that reliably delivers what we've planned. I'd put us up against any team of 4 on the planet to design beautiful, usable web software and deliver it on time. These folks are amazing.

Seriously appreciate your thoughts. :)

That's another one of the big things. We didn't talk about this one specifically, as it's not as common for folks to have. 1.5M uniques a month has come in handy, that's for sure.

We tried doing some Facebook advertising ourselves, but it didn't go so well. Jellop has done better, but they're REALLY great for products that have mass appeal.

With our narrower audience, the Font Awesome website has been the biggest driver.

You can indeed! Font Awesome Pro CDN will be free for open source projects. :)

it pays to hire some pros.

It certainly does. Arguably the best money our company has ever spent. (Okay, salaries. Because we have a ridiculously amazing team.)

Somewhat surprisingly, I've normally found this view to be more common with US based folks. I personally prefer icon fonts for a large swath of reasons, but other folks prefer SVG. So we're making both. :)

I think we'd be fine with that. Seems removed enough and isn't the whole set.

It's a good area for us to think about and be more specific about. I'll talk to the team and see what we can do.

Admittedly, we've been a bit light on specifics for price. But that's only because I'm worried it will undervalue Knox Avenue. Those folks can get by with charging a LOT more than they charged us.

Sandwich Video (a much bigger name in this space) starts at $250k for a video. And if you have the budget, they're worth it. Knox Avenue is ridiculously awesome and we were excited to be able to still afford them!

Yep, we definitely took inspiration from there!

If someone can see a font, they can pirate it. We just don't want to make it really, really easy.

Nope. Folks will be able to use just certain icon packs on their site. For more granular control, the $350k goal was a desktop icon subsetter.

Simplest answer is we're going to use the money to build a product that people want. Now that we have more capital and really awesome committed users, we know more about what to make.

We're 4 senior designers and developers that have been around. We can design beautiful, usable software and deliver it ontime. Honestly, I wake up every morning excited to go to work with such excellent and admirable folks. I could not imagine a better job. Honestly.

As far as the icons, no one else contributed. Just me. We tried external submissions before, but they were more work to manage than making them myself. And I think we've kept a somewhat consistent aesthetic. Starting over lets us tighten all of that up, too.

Honestly, you can get by with $2k if you're frugal and can write it yourself. There are always younger folks who are up and coming (like Knox Avenue but earlier) who will take a shot. But it's a good bit of work sorting through the noise.

I think we had a leg up since we made a Kickstarter video ourselves a couple of years ago. We knew what we were looking for.

Correct. It's not okay to distribute commercial software to folks who have not paid. But Font Awesome Free is completely okay to include in the repo, as it is open source software.

That said, we're letting open source projects use Font Awesome Pro CDN for free so this is hopefully mitigated. We want folks to use Font Awesome Pro, just don't want it distributed. :)

Estimation is key on a Kickstarter. We've got a team of 4 of the best designers and developers I've ever worked with who can deliver beautiful, usable products on time.

It's the highest compliment I can pay them professionally.

You're exactly right. Honestly, we were going to make FA5 anyway. Was time.