Updated 2026-07-27
The honest answer is that a logo costs anywhere from five dollars to fifty thousand, and both ends of that range are sometimes correct. What changes is not how the drawing looks — it is how much thinking, how much ownership, and how much risk comes with it.
Here is what each bracket actually buys, so you can spend the right amount for your situation instead of the amount someone quoted you.
$5–50: marketplaces and AI generators
You get a shape and a font, usually adapted from a template that other businesses are also using. Nobody asked what your business does or who it competes with.
This is genuinely fine for a hobby project, a temporary placeholder, or testing whether a business idea has legs. It is a bad idea for anything you will print, trademark, or build a reputation on — the risk of finding your logo on someone else's storefront is real.
$100–500: a freelancer doing a straightforward job
At this level you get a real person making decisions for your specific business, usually a few concepts and some revisions. What you generally do not get is research, a broader visual system, or much strategic thinking about positioning.
This is the right bracket for most small local businesses, and the results can be genuinely good. The variable is the designer, not the price — a strong designer at $400 beats a weak one at $4,000.
$1,000–5,000: identity rather than logo
Here the deliverable stops being one mark and starts being a system: logo variations for different sizes and contexts, colour and type rules, and guidance on how to use it all. Someone has looked at your competitors and made deliberate decisions about how you should look different from them.
This is where most funded startups and serious small businesses should be. The value is not a prettier mark — it is that everything you make afterwards looks like it belongs together, which is what makes a small business look established.
$10,000 and up: strategy, research and rollout
Stakeholder interviews, market research, naming work, multiple explorations, full guidelines, and application across packaging, signage, and digital. Often a small team rather than one person.
Worth it when a visual mistake would be expensive at scale — a national rollout, a rebrand of something people already recognise, a category where looking cheap costs you customers directly.
What actually drives the price
- Thinking, not drawing. The hours that make a logo work are spent understanding the business and rejecting the obvious first ideas — not in the vector editing.
- Ownership. Cheap marketplaces often license rather than transfer rights. If you cannot trademark it, you do not really own your identity.
- Scope. One mark, or the whole system that stops your website, invoices and packaging from looking like three different companies?
- Risk. What does it cost you if this looks wrong on a shopfront, or has to be redone in a year?
How to tell if you are about to overpay
Ask two questions before you commit. First: "what will you need to understand about my business before you start?" Anyone who does not need to know anything is selling you decoration. Second: "what exactly do I receive, and do I own it outright?" A vague answer here is the expensive kind of vague.
And if you already have a logo you are unsure about, get it looked at before you spend anything replacing it. A lot of logos people want to bin are fine — the problem is how they are being used.