Can I use a font commercially?

Free to download is not the same as free to use commercially

Plenty of fonts are free to install on your computer but restrict use to personal projects. A font sitting in a free-fonts directory can still carry a licence that forbids logos, merchandise, packaging, or client work. Read the licence file that ships with the font, or the foundry's page, before you put it in a deliverable.

Some foundries offer a free tier for personal use and a paid tier that unlocks commercial rights. Others are fully free under an open licence like the SIL Open Font License, which does allow commercial use, including modification, as long as you do not sell the font file itself.

Desktop, webfont and app licences are usually sold separately

A desktop licence lets you install the font and use it in design software to produce static outputs like print, PDFs, and flattened images. It typically does not cover embedding the font file on a website or inside an app, because those uses distribute the actual font software to end users' devices.

A webfont licence covers serving the font via CSS to render live text in a browser, usually priced by monthly pageviews. An app or ebook embedding licence covers bundling the font inside software or an ebook file so it renders on the end user's device without installation. Broadcast and server licences exist too, for video and dynamically generated documents. Buying one tier does not grant the others.

Typeface design versus font software: different protection in the EU and US

In the EU, the visual design of a typeface can be protected as a registered or unregistered design right, separate from the font software's copyright. Copying the letterforms closely enough, even by redrawing them, can infringe the design right even if you never touched the original font file.

In the US, typeface designs themselves are generally not copyrightable, following long-standing Copyright Office guidance, though the font software code that generates the letterforms is protected as a computer program. This means in the US you are mainly bound by the software licence terms rather than a design right in the shapes, while in the EU the shapes themselves can carry independent protection.

What actually gets you in trouble

The most common violations are embedding a desktop-only font on a live website, exceeding a webfont licence's pageview cap without upgrading, and baking a font into a logo or product for resale without a licence that covers that use. Foundries do audit visible commercial work and send invoices or cease-and-desist letters for unlicensed use.