How to read a quote

• Named team and their actual time on the project, not a role chart

• Number of review rounds and what happens after they are used

• Which applications are included, and who owns the files afterward

• Whether verbal identity is scoped, or quietly assumed to be your job

Ranges, and what moves them

As a rough map for 2026: a focused identity for an early-stage company tends to land in the low-to-mid five figures; a comprehensive system for a funded company with real complexity runs into the mid-five to low-six figures; and enterprise rebrands, with their research, stakeholder management, and rollout, climb well beyond that. The spread is wide because the inputs are wide, scope, ambiguity, number of decision-makers, and how much of the strategy is still unwritten.

The costly variable is almost always ambiguity. A client who knows their positioning, audience, and constraints buys execution. A client still discovering those things buys discovery too, and discovery is where the hours go. This is why the cheapest way to lower the price of an identity is to arrive with clarity, or to pay for the clarity first, deliberately, rather than accidentally.

Judge cost against consequence. An identity touches every future impression, every hire, every sale. Underspending on the foundation to save now usually means paying twice, once for the cheap version and again for the redo. The right question is not “what is the least this can cost,” but “what is the cost of getting this wrong.”