[rntz]

One argument is: if font designers had to pick just one price, instead of charging a higher price to bigger customers and a lower price to smaller ones, they'd need to pick a higher price in order to recoup their costs. This would price some smaller customers out of the market entirely.

The comparison with a freelancer misses the weirdness of digital goods, where there's zero marginal cost. The work of designing a font is only done once, and then has to be recouped over many sales; since each sale involves basically zero additional work, any choice of how to split up the cost among customers is inevitably artificial, and not based on how much work it represents.

And of course, any artificial way to decide how much each customer pays is going to screw somebody over for no good reason. I don't think there is a perfect solution here.