The four tiers
Branding is not one product, and most of the confusion about price comes from comparing quotes for different things. Four tiers cover almost everything on offer in the UK.
£500–£3,000: a logo. A freelancer or a marketplace produces a mark, a couple of colours and a font choice. No positioning work, no system, no applied use. For a pre-product company that needs something to put on a deck next month, this is a rational purchase. It will not survive your first real hire or your first enterprise deal.
£3,000–£10,000: a starter identity. An experienced freelancer or a very small studio: logo system, type, colour, a short set of guidelines, maybe basic social templates. Little or no strategy. Fine for a pre-seed company that needs to look credible and move fast. The common failure is that it is built for the company you are now rather than the one you will be in two years.
£15,000–£40,000: a full identity system from a specialist studio. Strategy input, a complete visual system tested across product UI, deck, web, social and print, real guidelines, organised source files, and often design tokens for engineering. This is the band most seed to Series A technology companies land in, and it is where the work starts to hold up under real use.
£40,000–£150,000+: strategy and identity as one engagement, usually with a website and launch campaign attached. Deep research, naming, positioning, full identity, applied systems, motion, and the go-to-market to land it. Series A and B companies making a category move, or anyone rebranding after a pivot or acquisition.
Priced separately
These are frequently quoted as line items rather than folded into an identity fee, and it is worth knowing the ranges before you are surprised by them.
- Brand strategy alone: £8,000–£20,000.
- Naming, including trademark and domain screening: £5,000–£15,000.
- Marketing website, design and build: £18,000–£50,000.
- Brand motion system and launch film: £4,000–£25,000.
- Pitch deck design: £3,000–£8,000.
- Ongoing design retainer: £3,000–£12,000 per month.
What actually moves the number
Scope is the obvious driver, but four things move a quote more than founders expect.
Surface area. One product with one audience is a fundamentally smaller job than a parent brand with three products, two audiences and a partner ecosystem. Sub-brands multiply cost faster than almost anything else.
Research depth. Six stakeholder interviews and a competitive audit is a week of work. Twenty interviews across three market segments plus quantitative validation is a month. Regulated markets usually demand the latter, because the cost of getting the positioning wrong with a compliance buyer is a lost year.
Whether engineering is in scope. Delivering a Figma library is one thing. Delivering tokens that compile into your codebase, working with your front-end team and shipping it is another, and it is worth paying for: it is the difference between a brand that holds and one that has visibly drifted by the next quarter.
Timeline. A compressed schedule costs more, always, because it means running phases in parallel and holding people exclusively. If you have a launch date you cannot move, say so at the first conversation rather than the third.
How to tell whether a quote is fair
Three questions separate a serious proposal from an expensive one.
Does it name the deliverables specifically? “Brand identity” is not a deliverable. “Primary and secondary logo, three lockups, type system with UI weights, colour system with tested contrast pairs, 40-page guidelines, organised source files” is. Vagueness in a proposal becomes an argument at handover.
Does it include strategy, or does it assume you have already done it? If a studio is going straight to visual design without asking who you are for and why you win, you are buying decoration. That may be all you need, but you should know that is what you are buying.
Who is actually doing the work? At agencies above a certain size, the people in the pitch are not the people on the project. Ask directly. It is a completely reasonable question and the answer is informative either way.
The honest summary
If you are pre-seed and need to look credible, £3,000–£10,000 buys something serviceable and you should not feel bad about it. If you have raised a seed round and brand is part of why you raised it, £15,000–£40,000 is the band where the work starts compounding. If you are at Series A making a category move, budget £50,000+ and treat it as go-to-market spend rather than a design cost, because that is what it is.
The expensive mistake is not overpaying. It is buying tier two when the business needs tier three, then paying for tier three eighteen months later anyway, plus the cost of migrating everything built on the first one.