I too would love to see @fontface fonts for sale for self hosting. I’ll be very surprised if the licensing is anything like a “traditional font” like adobes sells. (Buy it and use it in whatever you want). You might pay a site license to use a font.

But unless there’s some way for the font vendor to protect their intellectual property with some kind of DRM there’s no way they’ll ever do this. Someone would just upload a torrent with ever font they sell and then next day everyone on the net would be using them. It isn’t fair to the vendor as fonts are about the hardest thing to design in existence. Until this issue is sorted out, get your clients to sign up for the $50/year to get hosted fonts. If they don’t like it – There’s always verdana, arial, and trebuchet!

Technically sophisticated solutions that work cross-platform have been around for years in the form of products like Boreware’s Fairy and em2′s Glyphgate, yet almost nobody uses them. If this is such a crying need, why not? Perhaps because you have to pay for them.

Fact is within a few months, and with a couple of lines of code, anyone will be able to serve EOT fonts to IE and TTF fonts to Firefox, Safari, Opera and the rest from one’s own server. Provided you stick to fonts that have a permissive license you won’t need any of these orher “solutions”.

Lodrö

- C

For them to be stating that they’re providing a free service my thoughts are that they are allowing you to prove that you’ve purchased a typeface already. Perhaps the paid service is a single user license for renting fonts that you haven’t purchased for mocking up websites and whatnot where you have access to Typekit’s library of fonts. That way you can instantly use different typefaces for those pesky picky clients. This is just speculation, however.