WhatFontIs is an easy, fast, and flexible way to find almost any free or commercial font from any image. We help thousands of designers(famous or not) from all over the world identify the fonts they need to do their job.
A brief history of WhatFontIs:
In August (or July) 2009, Alexandru Cuibari started the development of the first font identifier that could also identify free fonts.
After almost a year of work and about 1500 coffee cups, the service was released, being able to recognize about 100 000 fonts. While it was accurate, the identification of a font took about 5 seconds
It was the first time we saw 100 active users on-site and about 100 000 visitors per month. We won the 2011 NetCamp Romania edition competing with 20 other startups.
Party time: 220 000 visitors per month and a database of 200.000 fonts we can identify. Yup, even the cursive ones.
On the surface nothing changed yet under the hood the system detects over 250 000 fonts. We managed to reduce the time needed for a font id to 3 seconds
Guy Kawasaki mentioned us on google plus. Thank you very much. Elon Musk, what do you use when you need to identify a font?
We can now identify fonts from all major foundries, helping 420 000 designers/month do their job faster. We had four visitors from the Arctic Pole. We have no idea if they were designers or polar bears?
We launched a chrome extension that could help designers submit the images directly to the detection machine. It was not a very successful one, to be honest.
We launched a new design, the first version of WFI that was responsive, as we saw more and more users coming from the mobile. We added CreativeMarket as another source for commercial fonts so we jumped to 326 000 indexed fonts. Around 6 million users visited us that year. That's more than the population of Denmark.
Also, we got banned for a week by Google Adsense because a font named Bu***ke was indexed. A sad week that showed us that monetizing from Ads only is very dangerous.
The beginning of a new era. We got a new colleague that started to shake up things and we decided to try to monetize the website directly from the people who use it instead of thinking how to put more and more ads. We started to let people log in with FB and Google, which got us almost 200 members/day!
We started focusing on users more and more. Among others, we changed the design (again) - and added: automatic character recognition, similar fonts based on font name which gets free similar alternatives to commercial fonts. We also added credit card payment besides PayPal only and opened-up for the outside world allowing the use of an API to identify fonts.
Change of design again. We learned from the mistakes and the user's feedback and launched a new version. Of course, some users hated it (as it happens even to Apple). Yet the result was a 30% increase in site usage.Good thing we ignored the hate.
Also, we were nominated as Site of the day by Product Hunt which meant a great deal for us. Ty Product Hunt!
We are the only system that added Adobe Fonts and Google Fonts as another source for commercial fonts and free fonts. We jumped to 580 000 indexed fonts. Around 13 million users visited us that year (over 50 million page views). That's more than the population of Belgium.
We launched a Google Chrome extension better than others on the market. Install Font Identifier by WhatFontIs.
We jumped to 800 000 indexed fonts. Around 21 million users visited us (over 90 million page views). That's more than the population of Romania.
We increase the PRO account to $59.90/3yrs or $39.99/1yr
WHATFONTIS COM SRL
PODARULUI 11B
BUCHAREST
ROMANIA
Phone: +1 559-206-0202