How to Check if a Website's Font Is Free or Requires a License

You found the perfect font on a competitor's website and you want to use it in your project. Before you download it from a random free font site, you need to know its licensing. Using a licensed font without paying for it can result in legal action — and type foundries actively enforce their licenses.

Font Detector helps with the first step: identification. Hover over the text and get the exact font name. But knowing the name isn't enough — you need to know the source.

The extension shows whether the font is loaded from Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts, a CDN like fonts.com, or self-hosted on the website's server. This tells you a lot about licensing.

Google Fonts are free and open source. Any font loaded from fonts.googleapis.com is available for free use in any project, commercial or personal. This is the best-case scenario. Popular examples include Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Poppins, and Playfair Display.

Adobe Fonts require a Creative Cloud subscription. If the font loads from use.typekit.net, you need an Adobe subscription to use it legally. The font files aren't available for download — they're served through Adobe's CDN and tied to your account.

Self-hosted fonts are trickier. The website owner may have purchased a license, but that license doesn't transfer to you. If you identify a self-hosted font by name, search for it on the foundry's website to check pricing and licensing terms.

Some premium fonts cost hundreds of dollars for a web license. Others are available through affordable subscriptions. And sometimes, a free alternative exists that's visually similar. Font Detector gives you the identification — from there, a quick search tells you whether the font fits your budget.