How much does a brand identity system actually cost?

We don't publish price bands. Not because the number is embarrassing, and not because we want you in a room before you find out. It's because a single published figure is a lie dressed as transparency — it implies that a brand system for a three-person pre-seed team and one for a Series B company entering a regulated market cost the same thing to do properly. They don't, and any studio that tells you otherwise is pricing by convenience, not by the work.

Most agencies quote by the hour, which sounds like honesty but does the opposite: it prices the slowest version of the work as the most expensive one, and rewards a studio for taking longer. We price by value instead — what the outcome is worth to your business, not how many hours it took us to think of it. That's a harder sell in a first email, and a much better deal by the time the work ships.

What actually moves the number, in order of how much it matters: how many things you're deciding at once (a name, a mark, a full verbal identity, or just a visual refresh, are four different jobs, not one), how contested the decision-making is internally (three stakeholders who agree is a different project than nine who don't), how much of the category you're trying to differentiate from, and how fast you need it. Speed is the most underrated cost driver — compressing a considered process into two weeks doesn't make it cheaper, it makes it more expensive, because it means more people working in parallel instead of in sequence.

What doesn't move it much, contrary to what you'd expect: company size alone. A well-funded team with a muddled decision process routinely costs more to work with than a smaller one that knows exactly what it's deciding and who's deciding it.

If you want an actual number, the honest version of that conversation takes twenty minutes, not a landing page. That's not evasion — it's the same discipline we apply to the work itself: we don't claim an outcome before we've done the analysis that earns it.