What Does a Professional Logo Cost?

A logo can cost you anywhere from $10 to well over $100,000. Yes, REALLY.

An online logo maker will spit one out for the price of a drive-thru lunch, a freelancer might charge a few hundred to a couple thousand, and a big agency rebrand can climb right on up into six figures. So, when someone asks me what a professional logo costs, my answer is always, well, what are you actually paying for? (Spoiler: it's not just a cute little icon.)

What you're really paying for is the thinking behind it.

When I design a logo, the first thing I want to know is the exact name that goes on it. Then, I want to know what kind of business it is, what you offer, and how people need to feel when they see it. Soft and playful? Clean and buttoned-up professional? Somewhere in between? Once I know your vibe AND all the clarity stuff, the logo gets a whole lot easier to design.

That's the part a $10 logo maker skips completely. It'll hand you something that looks fine, but they have no clue who your customers are or what makes you different (because nobody asked). And as I said in Do I Really Need Branding for My Small Business?, your logo is only one piece of your brand anyway.

The cheap logo usually gets paid for twice.

A cheap logo is totally fine when you're testing an idea. If you're not sure the business is going to stick, please don't spend a bunch of money finding out (and if budget is tight right now, here's how to build a brand on a limited budget). The trouble starts when the business actually WORKS.

Ohana Farms of Georgia came to me with a logo that was basically their name in orange, and that was it. It didn't match the rest of their brand, and it made the business look cheaper than it really was. So, I designed them a logo built on their messaging, and now they're swapping it in.

Most people think swapping out a logo is a HUGE deal, and it really isn't. Yes, it takes a little time and a few new signs, but, if a new logo gets you more sales, I promise you won't care one bit that you have to change your truck.

Sometimes it takes a little nudge.

At one point, Ohana wanted to keep the old logo on their website. Now, I'm an introvert, but I WILL speak up for my clients when I know something is going to help them (or hurt them). So I told her that if she wanted to get the most out of her brand, she needed to use the new one. She agreed, and it's on their website today! I'm never going to force anything on a client, but sometimes caring about someone's business means saying the slightly awkward thing.

What you should actually get for your money.

If you hire someone to design your logo, make sure you walk away with more than one lonely image file. At minimum, you want a few concepts to choose from, a round or two of revisions, and your logo in the formats you'll actually use. That means vector files (so it can scale up to a giant sign without getting blurry), PNGs for the web, and a black-and-white version. If a designer hands you a single JPG and calls it a day, RUN.

And if you can, get a few variations too, like a wordmark or a badge, plus your brand colors and fonts. Otherwise, a logo with no rules turns into five slightly different logos within a year. Then nothing looks like it belongs to the same business, and you're right back to feeling like your brand is pieced together.

So, should you just get a logo?

Sometimes I'll design just a logo for something small, like an internal program. But for a whole business, I tell people a logo is a great place to start, but they're going to want the messaging and positioning too (especially if a website and social media are coming next). It makes everything SO much easier when you're not constantly guessing what to say or what things should look like.

My Brand Foundation is $500, delivered within 7 days, and it's where your logo comes from. You get your positioning and messaging strategy, a logo suite (your primary logo plus variations like a wordmark or badge), 4 to 6 brand colors, three sets of typography, and two rounds of revisions.

If you're not sure whether you need a logo or the thinking that's supposed to come before it, tell me a little about your business, and we'll figure it out together.

Start your inquiry here →