Klim Type Foundry

New Zealand retail foundry behind Söhne, Tiempos, Founders Grotesk and Untitled Sans

Tier A · StrongTypefaceStudioklim.co.nz

Klim Type Foundry is Kris Sowersby's retail foundry, operating since 2005, with 55 published typeface pages grouped into 16 superfamilies plus 10 named custom commissions (PayPal Sans, Metric FC and others). It sells metered licences — desktop by seat, web by page views, app by monthly active users, OEM by device, advertising by impressions, broadcast by budget — with unlimited and enterprise tiers by quote. Free test fonts are available for internal evaluation only. Its in-use gallery holds over 1,400 documented uses.

For an agent

Use Klim as the reference point when a brief calls for a serious paid workhorse — Söhne for UI sans, Tiempos for editorial serif, Untitled for a neutral default — but never put a Klim font into a build without the client's licence, because every family is a metered EULA and there is no free-for-commercial tier. Marketing and licence pages are plain HTML and readable, but the per-family buy pages render prices through JavaScript and return only "Loading, please wait…" to a fetcher, so quote licence structure, not numbers. Their robots.txt disallows GPTBot outright; if you need a substitute you can actually ship, fall back to Velvetyne or Uncut in this index.

Why it is here. Klim's Söhne and Founders Grotesk defined the look of a whole decade of startup and editorial design, which makes it the honest benchmark against which any free alternative gets judged. Its published licence taxonomy is also the clearest explanation of how modern font metering works.

Install command, framework, licence and component list.

Facts

License: Font EULA, Commercial license
Pricing: Paid, Free trial
Framework: Not applicable
Styling: Not applicable
Distribution: Direct download / asset pack, Web app / online tool
Platform: Web, Print / static document
Content type: Fonts / typefaces, Prose / writing
Agent readiness: Structured documentation
Accessibility: Unknown
Maturity: Actively maintained
Pricing detail: No flat price list. Desktop priced by number of users, web by page views or unique users, app by MAUs or total downloads, OEM by number of devices, advertising by monthly impressions, broadcast by production budget or audience size. Unlimited Web, Unlimited App and Enterprise are bespoke. Test fonts are free but restricted to internal use.

Notable for

Söhne, Tiempos, Founders Grotesk, Untitled Sans
55 retail typefaces across 16 superfamilies
six metered licence types
free test fonts for internal evaluation
1,400+ documented uses

Provenance

Verified 2026-08-16. HTTP 200. https://klim.co.nz (homepage, 34 families + 10 custom projects named), https://klim.co.nz/sitemap/sitemap-0.xml (1,668 URLs: 55 /fonts/ pages, 16 /collections/, 10 /custom-fonts/, 1,472 /in-use/), https://klim.co.nz/licences/, https://klim.co.nz/buy/soehne/ (prices JS-gated), https://klim.co.nz/robots.txt (GPTBot disallowed)

Also in Typography

klim.co.nzTier A