Best Free Fonts for Commercial Use

The question of font licensing is one of the most misunderstood areas in design. Designers regularly worry about whether they can use a particular free font in a client project, on a commercial website, or in a printed product. For Google Fonts specifically, the answer is almost always straightforward: yes. The entire Google Fonts library is distributed under licenses that explicitly permit commercial use, free of charge and without ongoing royalties. This guide clarifies exactly what that means, then covers the best fonts for specific commercial applications — from websites and apps to print materials, logos, and code.

Understanding the SIL Open Font License

The SIL Open Font License (OFL) is the license used by the vast majority of fonts in the Google Fonts library. Developed by SIL International, a linguistic and literacy nonprofit, the OFL was designed to encourage font development and sharing while ensuring fonts remain freely available. It is one of the most permissive software licenses in existence.

What the OFL Permits

Under the OFL, you may use the font for any purpose: commercial or non-commercial, print or digital, personal or client work. You may embed fonts in documents, applications, websites, and products without paying fees. You may modify the font files, extend the character set, or adapt the design for your project's needs. Crucially, you may sell products that use the font — a website that generates revenue, a printed brochure for a paying client, a software application with a subscription fee — without any license payment, attribution, or notification to the font designer.

This level of freedom is genuinely extraordinary when you compare it to commercial font licensing. Fonts from major foundries like Hoefler&Co., Dalton Maag, or Monotype typically require per-seat, per-domain, or per-pageview licensing fees that can reach thousands of dollars annually for large commercial deployments. The OFL eliminates that entire cost category.

What the OFL Restricts

The OFL's restrictions are narrow and rarely impact practical commercial use. The license prohibits selling the font files themselves as standalone products — you cannot take an OFL font, repackage it, and sell it. It also applies the "Reserved Font Name" clause: if you modify and redistribute a font file, you must use a different name for the modified version. Finally, any modified font you distribute must also carry the OFL license; you cannot relicense OFL fonts under a more restrictive license.

None of these restrictions affect typical commercial design work. When you use a font to create a logo, website, or print piece, you are not redistributing the font file — you are creating a design artifact that is governed by copyright law for design work, not font licensing. The logo as SVG paths, the website as rendered HTML, the brochure as a printed document — all of these are your intellectual property, not the font's.

Fonts That Use Other Open Licenses

A small number of Google Fonts use the Apache License 2.0 (most early Roboto family versions) or other open licenses rather than the OFL. These licenses are equally permissive for commercial use. For practical purposes, any font in the Google Fonts library can be used commercially without fees — the specific license details differ slightly, but the commercial use permission is consistent across all of them.

Best Free Fonts for Websites and Apps

Inter

Inter by Rasmus Andersson is the definitive free font for commercial web and app development. Its meticulous screen optimization, comprehensive OpenType feature set, and variable font implementation make it technically superior to many paid alternatives. GitHub, Vercel, Linear, Notion, and hundreds of enterprise products rely on Inter — its commercial pedigree is as strong as any premium font.

For developers implementing Inter in a web font workflow, the variable font implementation is the efficient choice: one file covers all weights and widths. The font-display: swap strategy paired with a local system font fallback creates a near-instant perceived load time:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Inter';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-display: swap;
  src: url('/fonts/inter-variable.woff2') format('woff2');
}

Roboto

Roboto remains one of the most commercially deployable web fonts available. Its hybrid neo-grotesque/humanist design works across contexts, its weight range is comprehensive, and its screen rendering quality has been tested at a scale that very few fonts in history have achieved. For commercial projects targeting Android users or needing Material Design compatibility, Roboto is the natural foundation.

Poppins

Poppins is a strong choice for commercial websites in consumer-facing categories — e-commerce, lifestyle, beauty, health, and food brands particularly benefit from its rounded geometric friendliness. Its Devanagari script support makes it valuable for projects serving South Asian markets, and its broad weight range supports sophisticated visual hierarchies without requiring multiple font families.

Poppins

Poppins is a strong choice for commercial websites in consumer-facing categories — e-commerce, lifestyle, beauty, health, and food brands particularly benefit from its rounded geometric friendliness. Its Devanagari script support makes it valuable for projects serving South Asian markets, and its broad weight range supports sophisticated visual hierarchies without requiring multiple font families. For commercial projects where a warm, rounded geometric voice is appropriate, Poppins is the most capable free alternative to premium fonts like Brandon Grotesque or Proxima Nova.

The commercial practicality of Poppins extends to its script coverage: the Devanagari glyphs were designed at the same quality level as the Latin, which means multilingual sites serving both Latin-script and Devanagari-script users can use Poppins as a single unified typeface rather than needing separate fonts for each script. This reduces complexity in both the CSS implementation and the design system documentation — a meaningful practical benefit in enterprise commercial projects.

Best Free Fonts for Print Materials

Print creates different demands than screens. Font licensing for print materials is especially important to verify because print production often involves multiple parties — the designer, the printer, the client — and embedding fonts in PDF files for prepress is technically a distribution of the font software, even if it is not commonly treated that way legally. Under the OFL, embedding in PDFs is explicitly permitted, which eliminates this concern entirely.

Playfair Display

Playfair Display is the finest free font for print display work. Its high contrast, dramatic serifs, and meticulous spacing create printed headlines and cover designs that are visually indistinguishable from work set in premium commercial display fonts. For book covers, magazine spreads, event programs, and marketing materials where a strong editorial serif voice is needed, Playfair Display is the open-source answer to fonts that cost hundreds of dollars per license.

In print, Playfair Display performs best at 24pt and above. Below that, the thin strokes require careful handling — ensure sufficient ink coverage, avoid trapping issues by maintaining print weights above 0.5pt, and avoid reversed-out (white on dark) usage at smaller print sizes. At display sizes, the font's craft is self-evident.

Lora

For body text in print materials — brochures, annual reports, policy documents, print editorial — Lora bridges the gap between screen and print more naturally than most Google Fonts. Its calligraphic proportions and moderate stroke contrast were designed to accommodate both rendering environments, and in print it has a warmth that purely screen-optimized fonts lack. At 10-11pt in a printed report, Lora sets with exceptional comfort. The calligraphic stroke construction creates the kind of rhythmic consistency that makes long-form reading physically comfortable — the eye can scan across lines without the visual friction that mechanically constructed typefaces sometimes produce at text sizes.

Libre Baskerville

Libre Baskerville, a free revival of the classic Baskerville typeface, performs exceptionally well in print contexts. The original Baskerville — designed by John Baskerville in the mid-eighteenth century — was itself a technological statement about print clarity. The revival maintains the clean serifs, strong contrast, and open letterforms of that tradition while adding the optical corrections needed for small-size print use. For print materials in professional, legal, academic, and corporate contexts, Libre Baskerville provides a heritage-rich alternative to Lora when a more formal serif character is appropriate. It is available in Regular, Italic, and Bold — a limited range compared to other families, but sufficient for most print body text systems.

Best Free Fonts for Logos and Branding

Commercial brand identity work has specific requirements: fonts must be usable in trademarks, usable when converted to outlines, usable in perpetuity without ongoing licensing costs, and distinct enough to build recognizable brand equity. Google Fonts under the OFL meet all of these requirements.

The most commercially appropriate choices for logo work combine distinctiveness with longevity. Highly trendy fonts create brand identity that will look dated in five years; classic fonts with modern design sensibility create equity that compounds over time. Font families with broad weight ranges are preferred because brand systems evolve — a logo font that only exists in one weight will constrain the design system as it matures.

Montserrat's 18-weight range makes it the most commercially flexible logo font in the library. The ExtraBold and Black weights create commanding wordmarks; the Light and Thin weights enable refined display applications. Poppins and Raleway serve brands where circular geometry and visual lightness respectively are the primary brand signals. For brands requiring typographic authority, Playfair Display and EB Garamond provide commercial-grade serif options.

For a dedicated treatment of logo and branding font selection, including customization strategies and trademark considerations, see best fonts for logos and branding.

Best Free Monospace Fonts for Code

Monospace fonts for code are among the most commercially sensitive font choices in software products. Developer tools, IDEs, documentation sites, and products that display code prominently need monospace fonts that are both legible at small sizes and aesthetically appropriate for a technical audience that cares intensely about typography.

JetBrains Mono

JetBrains Mono by JetBrains is the finest free monospace font currently available and one of the best monospace fonts under any license. Designed specifically for programming, it incorporates ligatures for common coding digraphs (!=, =>, <=, ->, >=), consistent character width that maximizes code density, and distinctive letterforms that reduce common reading errors (1/l/I disambiguation is exceptional).

JetBrains Mono is OFL licensed, which means it can be bundled in commercial software products, embedded in web-based IDEs, and used in documentation without any license agreement. For developer tool companies, documentation platforms, and any commercial product that displays code, this combination of typographic quality and commercial freedom is exceptional.

/* Code block implementation */
pre, code {
  font-family: 'JetBrains Mono', 'Fira Code', 'Cascadia Code', monospace;
  font-size: 0.875rem;
  font-feature-settings: 'calt' 1;  /* Enable contextual alternates / ligatures */
  line-height: 1.6;
}

The calt OpenType feature activates the programming ligatures. Some style guides prefer to disable these; whether ligatures improve or impair code reading is a matter of personal preference and team convention, not objective typography.

Fira Code

Fira Code by Nikita Prokopov is the other major programming monospace on Google Fonts worth considering for commercial use. Its ligature set is perhaps the most extensive of any free programming font, covering over 60 coding sequences. Where JetBrains Mono has a more conservative design vocabulary — it could pass as a refined technical font in non-code contexts — Fira Code leans fully into its programming identity. The letterforms are slightly more stylized, the ligatures more visually elaborate.

For commercial developer tools where the aesthetic is "expressive and technical" rather than "clean and professional," Fira Code's design choices are more appropriate. The font is also available in a variable weight version, which is technically efficient for applications that need to offer font weight customization to users — editor themes, code review tools, or documentation platforms with user preferences.

Both JetBrains Mono and Fira Code cover the characters needed for most programming languages comprehensively, including mathematical symbols, box drawing characters for terminal-style interfaces, and the extended Latin coverage needed for code comments and documentation in multiple languages.

Licensing FAQ: What You Can and Can't Do

Can I use Google Fonts in a client project and charge for design work? Yes, without restriction. The fee you charge is for your design services, not for the font.

Can I use Google Fonts in a SaaS product that charges subscription fees? Yes. The OFL has no restrictions on commercial software products that use the font.

Can I embed Google Fonts in a PDF that is sold commercially? Yes. Embedding fonts in PDFs is explicitly permitted under the OFL.

Can I convert a Google Font to outlines in a logo and trademark that logo? Yes. Once a font is converted to paths/outlines, it is a design artifact governed by standard design copyright law, not font licensing. The trademark question is between you and the trademark office, not the font designer.

Do I need to credit the font designer? No attribution is required in design work. Attribution is only required when redistributing the font files themselves (for example, if you include the font files in a software package or website that allows users to download them).

Can I modify a Google Font and use it commercially? Yes, with the caveat that the modified font file must also be distributed under the OFL, and the modified font cannot use the original font's Reserved Font Name.

Can I sell a modified version of a Google Font? You cannot sell the font file itself. You can use a modified font in commercial products — websites, apps, print — without restriction.

What if I'm in a regulated industry (healthcare, legal, financial)? The OFL has no industry-specific restrictions. Medical software, legal documents, financial reports — all are permitted.

For more background on the open-source font licensing ecosystem and how it evolved to create the current moment of unprecedented free access to high-quality typography, see the open source font revolution. For a comprehensive review of the best Google Fonts for web use specifically, see best Google Fonts for websites 2026.