The numbers, and why the range is so wide
| Route | Typical | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| Generator or marketplace | £0 – £50 | A template combined with your name. Often not exclusive, frequently not yours in any legal sense, and usually supplied in formats that will not print. |
| Freelancer or small studio, logo only | £250 – £1,500 | A mark designed for your business, in the file formats you will actually need, with the variants for small sizes and dark backgrounds. |
| Small studio, full identity | £750 – £3,000 | The above plus typography, a colour system, and simple usage rules so the identity survives the next person who touches it. |
| Branding agency | £5,000 – £50,000+ | Research, positioning, naming, a full system, and the process to defend it. Genuinely valuable at a certain size and enormously oversold below it. |
| Cybrial, alongside a build | Inside the project | Identity work is done with the website rather than sold separately. Ongoing artwork sits in the growth hours. |
Source: Ranges from quoting against UK studios, 2024–2026. Cybrial pricing correct 4 September 2026.
The range is wide because "logo" describes four different products. At the bottom you are buying a picture. In the middle you are buying a designer's judgement about how your business should look. At the top you are buying a decision-making process — research, positioning, and the arguments to defend the result to a board.
Most small businesses need the middle one and are sold either the top or the bottom.
What you actually need to receive
This is the practical part, and the part that separates a cheap logo from a bad one. Ask for all of it, in writing, before you pay.
- Vector source files (SVG, and AI or EPS). Without these your logo cannot be scaled or reprinted properly, and every future supplier will charge you to recreate it. This is the single most common thing missing from a cheap purchase.
- The variants you will genuinely need: full colour, single colour, reversed for dark backgrounds, and a compact version for a favicon or a social avatar. A logo that only works at one size and one colour is half a logo.
- Raster exports at sensible sizes, so you are not sending a designer an email every time you need a PNG.
- The fonts, named, with their licences. A logo built on a font you are not licensed to use is a problem you inherit.
- The colours as hex, RGB and CMYK. Screens and print are different and the difference is visible.
- Written confirmation that the copyright is assigned to you. This is not automatic in UK law — commissioning a design does not by default transfer the copyright, which sits with the designer unless assigned in writing.
A logo is not an identity
The distinction is not pedantry, it is where the money goes wrong. A logo is one mark. An identity is the set of decisions that make everything you produce look like it came from the same business.
- Typography: which typefaces, at what weights, for headings and for body text. This does more visible work than the logo and gets a fraction of the attention.
- Colour: a primary, the supporting range, and what each is for. Two colours used consistently beats six used arbitrarily.
- Spacing and proportion: how much room things get. The most reliable difference between work that looks professional and work that does not.
- Photography or illustration: what the pictures look like, and what they never look like.
- The rules: a page or two saying how to use it, so it survives the next person who touches it.
The failure mode of buying a logo alone is predictable and universal: a good mark surrounded by whatever fonts and colours each subsequent supplier happened to like. Within two years the business looks like four businesses. That is what the identity work prevents, and it is why it is worth more than the mark itself.
Do you actually need a rebrand?
Usually not, and this is the section that costs me work.
Most projects that arrive as "we need a rebrand" are actually a request to make the existing identity consistent and apply it properly. That is a much smaller job, it costs a fraction as much, and it keeps whatever recognition you have built.
A rebrand is genuinely worth doing when the current identity is actively costing you: it is indistinguishable from competitors, it misrepresents what the business now does, it cannot be reproduced properly because nobody has the source files, or it embarrasses you in front of the customers you now want. Being three years old is not on that list, and neither is you being bored of it — you look at it daily and your customers see it once.
If you do rebrand, do it alongside the website rather than before it. The site is where the identity is used hardest, and designing one without the other means a second round of decisions.
Why consistency matters more than it used to
There is a new and unromantic reason to care about this, and it has nothing to do with aesthetics.
AI systems assemble their understanding of a business from everywhere it appears — your website, your Google Business Profile, your social profiles, directory listings from 2021 that you have forgotten. A business whose name, description and look differ between those sources is not a confusing business. It is one those systems have low confidence about, and low confidence means not mentioned when somebody asks for a recommendation.
That makes the dull half of identity work — one name, one description, one set of details, applied everywhere — a genuine visibility input rather than a matter of taste. It is also free to fix, and almost nobody has done it.
