Fontless

A simple, privacy-focused way to self-host Google Fonts.

4 followers

A simple, privacy-focused way to self-host Google Fonts.

4 followers

Fontless is the easiest way to self-host Google Fonts. Using Fontless, you gain control over your web-fonts and keep your users' data private.

Launch tags:Design Tools•Privacy•Developer Tools

Launch Team

Framer AI AgentsDesign and publish professional sites with AI

Promoted

Steakwallet

I'm a little confused by this, you can just download the fonts from google and host them on your own CDN. To me that's just a normal part of hosting a website. For Portabella (portabella.io) privacy is my top concern so obviously I can't send every user who visits to Google so I just host them myself. What am I missing?

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6yr ago

Metorial

Maker

@alex_harley Fontless aims to make self-hosting fonts super easy. Think of it as hosting something like Google Fonts yourself (and it's automatically generated by us). Fontless includes a Google Fonts-like API and a dashboard but it's open-source and hosted in your Vercel account so there are no privacy concerns.

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6yr ago

BlockSurvey

Congrats on the launch. I recently was searching for similar service and couldn't find one for long time. The found this on https://fontcdn.toolforge.org/ on HN. Fontless would have been great for me if I had few months ago.

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6yr ago

Metorial

Maker

@wilsonbright Thanks. Maybe Fontless will be useful for your next project. ✌️

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6yr ago

Metorial

Maker

Hey Producthunt! 👋 Fontless automatically generates and deploys a Google Fonts-like service just for you. 🔥 Everything can be configured right from your browser - no need to download anything. 🚀 Fontless is fully open source, so you don't have to trust a black box. https://github.com/varld/fontless For ages, web developers have trusted Google Fonts, without really knowing what it does and how it works. We have forced our website visitors to download fonts from somewhere else. Fontless aims to change that by offering the simplicity of a font-hosting-service with the performance and privacy of self-hosting fonts. My tip is to configure a Fontless service with all fonts that you will ever use (my personal one has about 60 fonts) and use it for all of your projects. Features: ⚡️ Lightning Fast - Fontless instances are hosted by Vercel's super fast, global CDN. 🚀 Simple Setup - Fontless instances can be configured and deployed in a browser. 🔒 Privacy Oriented - No tracking, no cookies, no analytics. Just fonts. 😎 Google Fonts-like API - All you need to do is to change the hostname. Fontless has full support for the Google Fonts CSS2 API. ☝️ It's yours - Fontless is open source and self-hosted. You don't have to trust a black box. I hope you like it. 🙌 If you have any ideas or feedback please tell me. I'd love to hear it. 🤷‍♂️ Tobias

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6yr ago

Form-Builder

Can you explain in what way Google fonts track you?

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6yr ago

Metorial

Maker

@danbars Sure, thanks for asking! Of course, Google Fonts can't inject any analytics script onto your website. However, Google has access to your visitors' IP addresses, GeoLocation, browser versions, and operating systems. They also have access to the URL your users are on. Using all of this data, Google can assemble a rough estimate of how many people visit your website and who they are. All without you knowing. I hope this answers your question.

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6yr ago

Form-Builder

@tobihrbr Theoretically they could, but: 1. Font files are cached by the browser across sites, so if your browser already downloaded some font it will not be downloaded again. 2. The domain from which it is served is not google.com so users' identity is not sent 3. Google themselves are saying that they are not using this data to track visitors. Only to track the popularity of fonts. You can read about it here https://developers.google.com/fo... Bottom line, sorry to be the party popper, but I don't see any good reason to use your service. It will just slow down my site, I will pay for hosting, and not really gain any benefit. Did you get any feedback that this solves someone's problem?

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6yr ago

Metorial

Maker

@danbars thanks for your feedback. But there are a few things I want to set straight: The user's identity is not sent to Google, but I never said that. Though fonts are cached by the browser. Google will still get a request at least once per day (since the cache TTL is 86400 seconds). This request includes the `referrer`-property, which can be used to track the domain and even the path the user is visiting. In addition, they also get the user's IP address, which can be used to find the rough location of the user. I know that Google says their service does not track anyone. However, their DNS service, 8.8.8.8, is known to (at least partially) track resolved domains. So I don't completely trust them on that. Fontless caches Fonts and uses Vercel's CDN, which is very fast. So performance is practically the same. Vercel's free personal plan includes 100GB of bandwidth per month, which should be enough for most users. So you probably won't have to pay. I also want to make clear that I don't think Google uses Google Fonts to track anyone personally. However, Google Fonts is a black box and no one outside Google really knows what's going on. They might use it for very basic tracking like they do with 8.8.8.8. I think Google offering a font-service, which probably serves multiple petabytes or at least may terabytes of data every month, for free sounds too good to be true. I mostly built Fontless for my own needs, since self-hosting fonts has a few benefits but I still like the simplicity you gain with a fonts service, like Google Fonts. But I completely get your critique. If you're more comfortable using Google Fonts that's absolutely fine.

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6yr ago

Form-Builder

@tobihrbr thanks for the detailed reply. Google holds data about the Internet and users in so many ways, from chrome, to analytics, adsense, cloud-servers, mobile phones and more. I admire your decision to fight this even though it's one small frontier. Really, not being cynical. For me, I will likely keep using their services directly 🙃

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6yr ago

Metorial

Maker

@danbars You're absolutely right. Fontless is definitly just a very tiny step. It is by no means ment to replace Google Fonts (it event depends on it). Thank you so much for your feedback!

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6yr ago

Lnky

Does this include the ability to add additional, non-google fonts?

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6yr ago

Metorial

Maker

@nickisnoble Sorry, not at the moment. But this sounds like a useful feature. One problem might be the licensing of some fonts in regard to hosting.

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6yr ago

does it support the variable fonts

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6yr ago

Metorial

Maker

@brian_teeman Currently Fontless does not support variable fonts. However, it uses woff and woff2 which are pretty efficient anyway. Is this something you need?

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6yr ago

@tobihrbr variable fonts is all I use now. they are still woff2 https://web.dev/variable-fonts/

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6yr ago