Copyright and size: fonts are larger than you might think because they need full Unicode support and good fonts have tuned variants for different weights, styles, and sizes, along with alternate symbols and ligatures, etc. which all add up.

Self-hosting is the way to go since it gives you full artistic control and you can use things like the Unicode-range CSS property to tell clients how to combine smaller fonts so you can support many languages without forcing a French browser to download a ton of Chinese glyphs which aren’t used on the page.

Another nice option we have now is using font-display to allow using a similar system font until downloads are completed, which can work really well for slow connections:

https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2020/a-font-display-setting-...