Founding access · built in public
Stop scrolling fonts. Start shortlisting.
The quick brown foxyours · indexed free jumps over the lazy dogcan’t license it? free match.
The problem
You own the right font. You just can’t find it, or prove you picked it.
A thousand files in Font Book, a few hundred more in folders, bookmarks you never reopen, an Are.na channel, a Pinterest board from 2023. One designer with 7,000 fonts calls previewing the collection with the project’s headline “ten to twenty excruciating minutes” — every single search.
01
The whole shelf, one headline at a time
You know the feel and can’t name the face, so you scroll a thousand cards in the project’s own words — if your manager will even render your own text.
02
Search by name, never by what it can do
“Which of mine have small caps and Cyrillic?” is a question you answer by opening fonts one at a time in a separate tool.
03
The client asked for a face you don’t own
A studio with 10,000 licensed fonts still hunts by hand for one that resembles the requested face. The budget covers one licence, or none.
04
The decision leaves no trace
Designers type font names into the Illustrator file so they can answer a client after outlining. Two years later the file opens and the reason is gone.
How it works
Two objects. A Shelf that reads your folders, a Board that keeps the decision.
That’s the whole product. Everything else is in service of those two.
01 · The Shelf
Your whole collection, in the project’s own words.
Give the browser permission once and Typecase reads every font installed on your machine, plus any folder you point it at. Type your client’s headline into the preview bar and all of it re-renders — not a specimen sheet somebody else chose. Facets are capability-first: small caps, ligatures, Cyrillic, variable axes, all read straight from the font file, never guessed.
Read-only. Nothing is installed, moved, or uploaded.
Open the Shelf → Working now, free — Shelf, Search and Boards.
02 · Three lanes
Matching a brief and resembling a reference are different questions.
So they get different answers. Pick the feel, era and use from the brief, add constraints like must have small caps, and results come back in labelled lanes — never one mixed ranking. Every candidate says why it’s there in words drawn from its own measured attributes, and two buttons let you tell it that it’s wrong.
Owned fonts rank first, always.
03 · The Board
The part your font manager has never done.
Eight to twelve candidates per project, each with the lane it came from, where it came from, whether you can actually use it, and the sentence you wrote while it was still fresh. Paste a link or drop a screenshot and that lands here too, with its source and the date. Export to PDF and it lives next to the artwork — so the question in 2028 has an answer.
Renders without installing or activating anything.
Three lanes
“Similar” means three different things. So there are three lanes.
Mixing them into one ranked list is how tools end up offering Marker Felt for a script brief. Pick a brief below, then type your own headline into the preview bar — every specimen re-renders.
Free alternatives
“Beautiful. What’s the free one?”
Point at any font on your shelf. Typecase measures its letterforms — contrast, stem weight, x-height, set width, how the serifs sit — and ranks 1,601 open-licence families against it, naming how each one differs.
We don’t tell you these are legally interchangeable, and we don’t score the resemblance out of ten. Both would be claims we haven’t earned. The delta line and your own eyes do the work.
It matches fonts you have, because a font has to be measured to be matched — so it answers “the client won’t pay for this one”, not “name that font from a screenshot”. Free on every plan.
THE CLIENT ASKED FOR
Playfair Display
Didone · high contrast · 12 styles · variable
1 · ON YOUR SHELF
DM Serif Display · same Didone construction; 2 styles instead of 12, no variable axis.
Libre Caslon Text · lower contrast, narrower, has a true italic.
2 · OPEN LICENCE · VERIFIED, NEVER ASSUMED
Matches the high contrast and ball terminals; 1 style, no italic, covers Cyrillic.
What Typecase promises
Complement the manager you use
Typecase reads font folders and never moves, installs, or uploads a file. Keep Font Book, FontBase or Typeface exactly as they are.
Your shelf first
Every result set starts with what you already have. Fewer purchases you didn’t need.
Label every candidate
Three lanes, a why line on each result, and two ways to tell it that it’s wrong.
Remember the decision
The Board keeps the candidate, the source, the availability and the reason.
Local first
Your fonts are read in the browser and indexed on your own machine. No account to look around, and no font file is ever sent anywhere.
No legal claims, no taste automation
Availability and licence fields are user-reported. Resemblance is a suggestion. You decide.
Where it sits
A layer between your font manager and your client work.
Typecase doesn’t replace anything you already run. It does the one job none of them do.
| Tool | What it’s good at | Where Typecase fits |
|---|---|---|
| Font Book | Free, fast, already installed | Adds your own preview text across everything, and capability search |
| FontBase, Typeface, RightFont | Activation, watched folders, huge libraries | Keep them. Typecase reads the same folders and adds retrieval and the Board |
| WhatTheFont, WhatFontIs | Identifying one font, once | We never claim identification — we link out to them |
| Fonts Ninja | Naming the fonts on a web page | Different job. Paste what it finds onto a Board |
| Marketplaces & AI search | Discovery inside one catalogue | They stop at the catalogue edge. Typecase starts at your shelf |
Pricing
Pay once. Keep it.
Designers have said, loudly and in public, what they think of $86 a year for a font manager. They’ve also praised paying $36 once. So there’s no subscription here — one payment, and the version you bought stays yours.
Enough to know whether it earns its keep.
- The whole Shelf — every font you own, indexed
- All three search lanes, unlimited
- Top 3 free alternatives for any font you own
- 10 saved references from links, names or screenshots
- One active Board
Nothing to install.
Perpetual licence. No renewal.
- Export a shortlist as PDF or Markdown for a client
- The full ranked list of free alternatives, not the top 3
- Unlimited saved references and unlimited Boards
- Every update while it’s in beta, and a say in what ships next
The price when it’s finished.
- Everything in founding
- 12 months of updates included
- $29/yr after that, entirely optional
- The version you paid for keeps working either way
FAQ
The things designers ask first.
How does it decide a free font is similar?
It measures both. Each face is rendered and its letterforms measured — contrast between thick and thin, stem weight, x-height against cap height, set width, how much the serifs spread. The open-licence corpus was measured the same way, by the same code, so the comparison is like for like. There’s no model, no embedding, and no similarity score: you get a shortlist ordered by measured closeness, and a line naming how each candidate differs from yours. Fonts your machine renders slightly differently to ours are corrected for automatically, using families you own that are also in the corpus. Within one category a lot of faces measure very close, so treat it as a shortlist to look at rather than a ranking to trust blindly — which is why every result is shown set in the actual font.
What’s actually free?
Indexing your whole collection — however many thousand — all three search lanes, the top three free alternatives for any font you own, ten saved references, and one active Board. No account, no card. That’s enough to decide whether the thing works on your actual fonts. The $39 is for doing the job with it: exporting a shortlist a client can read, seeing the full ranked list of alternatives rather than the first three, and running more than one project at a time. Nothing you’ve already made is ever locked away — boards and notes stay readable and searchable on the free plan for good.
Do my font files get uploaded?
No. Your browser reads the fonts and everything is indexed on your own machine. No font file, and no rendered specimen of one, is ever sent to a server. The app makes exactly one request of its own — asking whether your account has unlocked unlimited Boards — and it carries nothing but that question. Don’t take my word for it: open your browser’s Network tab and watch. That check is more trustworthy than any panel I could put in the app, since I’d be the one writing the panel.
Is this a download?
No. It runs at typecase.dev. You grant the page permission to see your installed fonts once, and it indexes them locally. Nothing to install, nothing to notarise, no Gatekeeper warning — and updates just appear.
Which browsers?
Chrome, Edge and Arc on desktop today — they’re the ones that let a page read your local fonts, with your permission. Safari and Firefox haven’t shipped that yet. If you’re on one of those you can still point Typecase at a folder of font files by dragging it in.
Does it replace Font Book or Typeface?
No, and it isn’t trying to. It doesn’t activate or deactivate fonts, resolve conflicts, or manage sets. Those tools are good at that. Typecase does retrieval and the record — the parts they don’t do.
Will it tell me if I’m licensed to use a font?
Never. Availability and licence fields are yours to fill in, they’re labelled “user-reported” everywhere they appear, including in exports, and nothing is inferred from a file or a receipt. Determining rights is a job for you and the rights holder.
Can it identify a font from a screenshot?
It can show you what on your own shelf resembles it, labelled “looks like, not confirmed.” It will not tell you what the font is, and every one of those results links out to a real identification service. Guessing confidently is how the existing tools lose people’s trust.
What if I want my data out?
Export the whole index and every Board as JSON, any time, no ceremony. Boards also export as PDF and Markdown so a shortlist can sit next to the artwork it belongs to.
Who’s building it
One person, in public, on a written plan.
Typecase started as a written spec before a line of code: what the evidence supports, what it doesn’t, and which claims aren’t allowed to be made. The parts that were only guesses got cut. What’s left is the wedge — shortlist from your own shelf, and remember why.
Buying founding access buys the thing being built now, at the price it costs while it’s being built, from someone you can email.
Stop re-finding the same fonts.
Your collection already has the answer. Typecase is the twenty minutes at the start of a project, given back.
No account for the free plan. Refunded in full if it isn’t working in your hands within 14 days.