Ask three studios to design a logo and you will get three prices that look like they came from different industries. It is a reasonable thing to find annoying. It also has a real explanation, and it is not that the expensive one draws better.
The drawing is the smallest part of the job. What you are paying for is everything that has to be true before the drawing can be right, and everything that has to exist afterwards for it to survive contact with the real world.
You are paying for the decisions made before anyone opens a design tool
A mark cannot be judged in isolation. It can only be judged against a job. Who is this for, what do they currently believe, what does it need to survive — a signboard seen from a moving car, a forty-pixel favicon, an embroidered polo, a reel someone is already scrolling past?
A cheap logo skips that conversation and gives you something that looks good on a white artboard at full zoom. That is the one context it will almost never appear in. We have written about that specific failure in more detail — a mark gets half a second, and that is the whole brief.
You are not buying a picture. You are buying every decision that made that picture the correct one, and the proof that it holds up everywhere you will have to use it.
What actually moves the price
- Scope. A mark on its own is one thing. A mark plus the type system, the colour system, the rules for how it behaves on a photograph, on black, at 20 pixels, in a single colour — that is a different piece of work with a different price.
- Rounds. Exploration costs time. Three genuinely different territories, each taken far enough to be judged fairly, costs more than one safe route dressed up as three.
- Applications. A logo that has been tested on the signage, the packaging, the invoice and the uniform is a logo that will work. Someone has to build all of those to find out.
- Ownership. Whether you get the working files, whether the type licence covers your use, whether you can hand it to another studio in three years without buying it again.
Notice that none of those are aesthetic. They are all questions about how much of the real problem is being solved, and by whom, and who owns the answer at the end.
The cheap logo is rarely the cheap one
The bill you can see is the design fee. The bill you cannot see arrives later: the sign that had to be remade because the mark was unreadable at the size the shopfront allowed, the packaging run that came back muddy because nobody specified how the colour behaves in print, the pitch deck where the logo sat on a dark slide and simply vanished.
Every one of those is someone paying twice for a decision that was skipped once. That is the actual cost of the cheap logo, and it is paid by whoever inherits it.
What a fair answer looks like
A studio should be able to tell you, before you commit, exactly what you get: how many directions, how many rounds, which applications are tested, what files you own, and what happens if you need something new in a year. If they cannot, the number is a guess, and a guess is what you will get.
That is how we quote identity work, and it is why the first thing we ask for is not a mood board but a brief — the brief is the work. If you want a real number for a real scope, tell us what you are building and we will show you what is in it.