In reply to Licensing a typeface vs. commissioning similar design:
A big factor in the pricing will be the size of the glyph set. This is usually where we start from in working out a price, which also means that we tend to do a lot of work up front with a potential client, discussing their language support needs, typography layout feature sets, reading environments, etc.. This planning work helps us to provide detailed price quotes, so the client understands exactly what they are paying for.
[For the Brill fonts we spent almost two years gradually developing a plan with them before we got to the contract signing phase. It doesn't normally take that long, but their needs were very extensive and even before they came to use they'd spent a long time cataloguing all the typeforms in their publications. Each font ended up containing more than 5,000 glyphs.]