How much does branding cost?
Every client asks us some version of this question, whether they're a solo founder, a venture-backed startup, a small business, or a nonprofit. And almost every agency gives the same answer: "it depends." Which is true, but not helpful. So after two decades of going over each price point one phone call at a time, I'm going to open our books and give you actual numbers: what we charge at Condensed, what changes at each price point, and what your budget is actually buying when you hire a boutique branding agency like ours.
Why are we publishing our prices?
Most agencies don't publish pricing because every project is different, and a number without context can be misleading. But it leaves you guessing, with no frame of reference when the quotes start coming in. We'd rather hand you the frame.We're built differently than most: one team, one project at a time. The projects we choose to work on get the full attention of our core team. We've never been an agency that only picks up the phone for big budgets. We choose clients based on whether their mission resonates with us and our teams are a good fit, which is why our client list is a mix of startups, small businesses, and nonprofits. We do our best work on projects where we're fully behind the company.Because we're selective about fit rather than fixating on budget, we have no reason to hide our numbers.
What every budget gets, no matter the size
Research and strategy happen on every job. Period. Without them, we'd just be creating a beautiful visual identity that might not make any sense for your product, industry, goals, or target. A logo without strategy is decoration.Same team, same standards. There is no B-team at Condensed.A bigger budget doesn't buy you a better result, it buys more of our time. More logo concepts, more rounds of revisions, deeper research, more examples of your brand applied in the real world, more documentation of the strategy. If the research points to a type-based logo, more time goes into typography. If it calls for custom illustration, the effort shifts there. Your budget buys time; the strategy spends it.The last variable is expertise. You can't expect to pay the same for a freelancer fresh out of college and a boutique agency with over two decades of know-how behind every decision. The hours aren't the same hours.Once you understand these principles, agency pricing stops being a mystery. Here's the menu:
The real numbers: what each budget gets you at Condensed
$10K–$15K: the baseline for serious professional work
Who it's for: an individual entrepreneur or a small brick-and-mortar or nonprofit looking to scale. Timeline: 2–3 weeks.This is the leanest version of our process, but it's the full process. You still get research and strategy; they're just condensed into a simplified brand brief. You'll see around 3 logo options with one round of revisions on the direction you choose. We'll define your typography and color palette, with 2 options and one round of revisions for each.The final deliverable is a visual style guide. This is different than a brand guide, as we don't set parameters for voice, tone, values, or positioning statements. It's your visual identity, professionally built on real strategy. Nothing more, nothing less.
$15K–$20K: entry level for startups and growing businesses
Who it's for: Seed to early-stage funded startups, nonprofits, and businesses with a small footprint. Really, any entrepreneur who understands what good branding is worth. Timeline: 3–5 weeks.Same depth of research and the same simplified brief, but now the exploration opens up. You get two full rounds of logo options (3 to 6 marks per round), each with a pass of revisions and tweaks. You also get double the application mockups, for instance: your brand on a billboard, a shirt, collateral. Each mockup is an original design, created from scratch to show how the identity system can be applied in real-life context. Seeing your brand out in the world tells you things a logo on a white background never will. Mockups are a time-consuming but necessary step to allow you to fully visualize the brand.The final deliverable is a style guide that details each facet of the visual identity: the chosen logo with examples of how it can and can't be used, the typefaces that execute the look with a sample type hierarchy so future designers know how to apply them, and the color palette with guidance for applying it across print and web.
$20K–$40K: the full brand build
Who it's for: Two profiles show up here again and again. The first is a successful business that is pivoting, or has simply outgrown their branding. The second is a startup fresh off a funding round whose investors are urging them to level up their bootstrapped brand. It's a gap a VC can see from a mile away, but a profitable startup is often blind to it. Timeline: 5–7 weeks.This is where the advanced brand brief comes in: deeper competitive analysis and white space opportunities, clear mission and vision, initial positioning and messaging building blocks. You get two rounds of logo options with optional revisions on chosen marks, two rounds of typography and color, more mockups throughout, and a weekly call to go over progress.The deliverable grows too: a brand guide that spans visual guidelines and strategic messaging, including a positioning statement, brand values, messaging direction with voice & tone recommendations. A much clearer picture of the entire brand. There's no hard wall between visual identity and narrative. It's a gradient, and budget moves you along it.
$40K–$60K: maximum time at every stage
Who it's for: Clients who want a wide range of options and complete flexibility in terms of revisions, schedule, and custom requests. This is helpful when there is a large group of stakeholders involved in the decision-making, such as a Board in addition to the staff team. Large non-profits and well-funded, successful startups often fall in this range. Timeline: 2–3 months. (Complex projects or slower decision cycles can extend this.)The top of our range simply buys more time at every single stage. The most complete strategy and brand brief. Up to four rounds of logo options; we rarely need that many, but it's nice to have them available. More type options, more color options, including a secondary or UI palette. Additional mockups, flexibility with revisions at every stage.And the deliverable becomes a full, custom-designed brand book, with more detailed description and explanation. The point of all those pages is simple: less room for ambiguity. Every designer, marketer, or agency that touches your brand after us will make fewer wrong guesses.
Add-ons are their own menus (naming, for example)
Naming is a separate process from visual identity, with its own levels. At Condensed, naming runs $5K–$25K and takes anywhere from 2–3 weeks to 2 months.What drives a 5x price spread for the same deliverable (a name)? Four dials: how many options you see, how many rounds of revisions, how deep the strategy research goes, and how much diligence we do on potential trademark issues. The higher the tier, the more rigor and less risk.Since we're on the subject: yes, we practiced what we preach. "Condensed" means two things to us. First, it describes the team: a small group of experienced, multi-hat talent. Our designers are coders and our coders are designers; we have animators and illustrators; everyone brings more than one skill. Second, it describes our strategy: we condense ideas to their simplest form. We feel brand that looks and feels simple is always the best solution Making a brand look effortless is very hard work. And that's what we love to do.
Fixed fee vs. retainer-based hourly: what's the difference?
Here's something agencies rarely explain. Some kinds of work scope cleanly to a fixed fee. Naming and branding are like this, as the scope and process are pretty standard, which is why everything above has a price range attached. Other kinds of work don't, and pretending they do costs everybody.Once we've branded a client, we typically transition to retainer-based hourly work for everything that comes after: website design, UI/UX for their digital product, packaging, marketing assets, whatever a growing company needs. Hourly is better for the client on almost every level. No time burned scoping and writing proposals for every little project. No padding built into budgets to account for revision rounds that may end up not being necessary. Priorities can shift the moment the business needs them to, and the client is incentivized to give fast feedback, which keeps everything moving. They almost always get more done for less.This approach is often less profitable for us. There's a philosophy popular at big agencies called value-based pricing; the idea is that you should price work based on how important the problem is to the client, rather than how long the work takes. It has always rubbed us the wrong way. Our measuring stick isn't how much money we can extract from a project. It's how successful the client becomes because of our work.Here's what that looks like in real life: Tough Mudder came to us as two founders with an idea, and they grew into a global brand doing over $100M a year in revenue. We rebranded ShopMy when their team was just a handful of employees and have continued working with them for years as they've grown to a $1.5B valuation. Stories like these only happen with continued brand and design support. Brand a company and send them on their way, and you've sent them out at a disadvantage.
What budget does NOT buy
Just as important as what the money buys is what it doesn't:A better design team. In our case there's only one.A guaranteed better logo. Sometimes the right direction shows up in round one of a $10K project. More rounds buy certainty and exploration, not magic.Priority over other clients. We concentrate on one new branding job at a time. If we're on your project, you have all of us, regardless of what you paid.What budget does buy: exploration, certainty, documentation, and lower risk.
Questions to ask any agency (because their numbers will differ)
Every agency prices differently. What our numbers can give you is guidance. The real variables behind any branding quote are expertise, time, options, rounds, research depth, and documentation. So ask any agency you're considering:Who, specifically, will work on my brand? This is the big one. At large agencies, you usually do not get the top talent whose work built the agency's reputation, especially if you have a lower budget. You get a less experienced team, and often one that plays it safe by churning out whatever looks trendy at the moment, because trendy is the safe bet.How many directions will I see, and how many rounds of revisions? Not just for the logo. Ask about typography, color, and the rest of the system too. That exploration is most of what you're paying for.What's actually in the brief? Real strategy and positioning, or is the focus visual only? How many projects do you run at once? And how much attention will mine actually get? What does the final deliverable include? A visual style guide and a full brand book are very different things.How do you decide which clients to take on? The answer tells you whether you're a check or a partner.
A word about budgets outside our range
If your budget is less than $10K: A boutique branding agency isn't the right fit at this budget, but you have options. A good individual freelancer can take you a long way. And yes, you could even try your luck with AI. It's far from agency work, but it might be the temporary solution needed to get off the ground and start generating revenue. This isn't settling. It's sequencing. Launch with what you can afford, and come back to an agency when you reach the next stage of your development. If you have $60K or more: Above our branding range, the budget shifts from creating the identity to applying it: custom website design, UI/UX for your digital product, packaging, marketing assets. Brand Strategy and Design work is something that needs an annual budget for any startup brand, not a one-time spend and walk-away. The brand we develop becomes the foundation for years of design work to come.
Maximize relationships, not profits
That ongoing relationship isn't reserved for big-budget clients. It's how we try to work with every partner we take on, because continued support is the only way we can make sure our clients keep growing. I've worked at big agencies with the opposite strategy: land large fixed-fee jobs, finish them as fast as possible, move on to the next one. That maximizes profit. We'd rather maximize relationships. It's made us a more resilient agency, 22 years and counting. Our clients keep coming back because they can see what the work does for them.So that's what a branding budget actually buys: time, and expertise. A system, not just a logo. Certainty, not priority. Whatever your number is, you now know what to ask and what to expect.And if you've got a project you think we'd find interesting, at any price point, we'd love to hear about it.
Condensed is a distributed boutique branding agency with offices in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley. Making brands simple since 2004.
