Ask five agencies to quote a brand identity project and you'll get five wildly different numbers — sometimes ten times apart for what looks, on paper, like the same brief. That range isn't a scam, and it isn't random either. It comes down to a handful of factors that actually predict cost, most of which have nothing to do with how good the designer is.
The honest price ranges
These are broad, but they hold up across most of the market:
- A logo alone: anywhere from a few hundred dollars (freelance marketplace, fast turnaround, limited revisions) to €3,000+ from an established studio with a proper discovery and concept phase.
- A logo plus a basic style guide: typically €1,500–€5,000 — colour palette, typography, a handful of usage rules.
- A full identity system (logo, guidelines, colour, typography, packaging or collateral concepts, social templates): €5,000–€30,000+ depending on scope and who's doing it.
- Enterprise rebrands from large agencies: six figures is normal once you factor in research, stakeholder workshops, and rollout across every touchpoint a large company owns.
If a number you've been quoted doesn't fit anywhere on that spectrum, it's worth asking why — either you're getting a lot less than you think, or a lot more than you need.
What actually drives the price
Scope, not talent
The single biggest lever is how many deliverables are actually in the brief. "A logo" and "a full identity system" get quoted by the same designer at wildly different prices, because they're different amounts of work — not because one designer phase is more skilled than the other. Bundling everything into one brief without pricing each piece is exactly what makes agency quotes feel opaque and hard to compare.
Revisions
"Unlimited revisions" sounds generous until you notice it's rarely actually unlimited in practice — most studios cap it somewhere, whether they say so upfront or not. A defined number of revision rounds, stated clearly, is usually a sign of a studio that's thought through its own economics rather than one hoping you won't ask.
Speed
Turnaround time costs money. A studio promising a first draft in two days is either running a genuinely efficient process, or padding the price to cover rushed work. Worth asking directly what happens to quality when a deadline is tight.
Who's actually doing the work
A named senior designer costs more than an unnamed junior on a marketplace — obviously. Less obvious: a lot of mid-tier agency pricing covers account management and overhead layered on top of the actual design hours, not just the design itself.
The cheapest quote and the best value are rarely the same line item — the real question is what you're actually paying for underneath the number.
Where AI changes the math
The newest variable in this pricing conversation is AI-assisted production. Done well, it genuinely compresses the expensive part of the process — the first-draft exploration phase, where a designer used to spend hours generating options before any human refinement even started. That's real cost that can come out of a quote without touching quality, because the actual craft — art direction, brand judgment, the final polish — still comes from a person.
Done badly, "AI-powered" is just a way to justify a discount on work that was never going to be very good in the first place. The tell is usually in what happens after the first draft: does a human designer actually review and refine it against the brand, or does the AI output ship as-is?
The real question to ask
Not "what's the cheapest quote" — but "what exactly is included, and who signs off on it before I see it." A vague scope and an unclear revision policy are far bigger financial risks than a slightly higher day rate, because that's where projects quietly balloon past their original budget.
See real numbers for a project like yours
Aoibh's pricing is public, in pounds, and states exactly what counts as one project.
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