What a brand refresh costs a small business
Published 16 September 2026
The question comes up in every first conversation and almost never gets an honest answer, because "it depends" is convenient for the designer. Below are concrete ranges: mine, and those of six other firms that publish their prices.
What the market looks like in September 2026
I went through the price lists of firms that publish them openly. The spread is enormous, and that is the first thing worth understanding.
| Who | For what | How much |
|---|---|---|
| Soluma Interactive | logo design | from 549 PLN net |
| thenewlook | identity for a small business | from 1 400 PLN |
| Me | visual identity | from 2 000 PLN |
| adreams | logo + card + palette (agency) | 2 500 – 6 000 PLN net |
| Avangardo | logo + brand guidelines | 3 000 – 7 000 PLN |
| WebyJuice | full identity with a brand book | from 6 000 PLN |
| Chersky Marketing | full rebrand of a small or mid-sized firm | 5 000 – 20 000 PLN |
| adreams | the whole market, generator to agency | 500 – 50 000 PLN |
As of September 2026, from these companies' public price lists.
Why the spread is a hundredfold
Because the single word "logo" covers three completely different things.
Five hundred zloty buys a mark. One file, usually generated or assembled from stock parts. You get an image. What to do with it next is your problem.
Two to seven thousand buys a mark you can actually use. Colours recorded so a printer can reproduce them. Typography. Versions for light and dark backgrounds, for a square and for a wide format. Rules, so the next person does not ruin it on the first banner.
Above ten thousand, strategy work begins: research, workshops with the team, brand positioning, name testing. That makes sense when a company has a marketing department to use it.
A small service business almost always needs the middle tier. For the first it pays twice, because a year later the mark turns out to be unprintable on a banner. For the third it pays for things it will never use.
What I do and for how much
| Scope | What you get | Price |
|---|---|---|
| The mark with a system | the logo in a full set of versions — light and dark ground, wide and square, single-colour — plus palette, typography and written rules of use | from 2 000 PLN |
| The full set with materials | the above plus designs for what you actually print: banner, business card, customer card, stickers | from 4 000 PLN |
The website and photography are separate items — the full price list is on the services page. I do not bundle everything together, because almost nobody needs everything at once.
I do not sell the mark alone without rules of use, and that is a decision, not a price-list gap. A logo without recorded colours and versions drifts into three different variants within six months, because everyone who assembles anything does it their own way — and then you pay a second time to tidy up what you already bought. If what you want is a file for a few hundred zloty, you will find it at the firms in the first row of the table above, and I will not talk you out of it.
The design is not the whole cost
This is the thing nobody warns about, and it surprises people more than the quote itself. Designing a piece and producing it are two separate expenses.
Beyond the design there is usually:
- printing — a gate banner, business cards, stickers, customer cards; that is a print shop cost, not mine, but it has to be in the budget
- vehicle or shopfront wrapping, if the business has a fleet or premises
- a stamp, letterhead, document templates, if the mark itself changes
- domain and hosting, if a website is being built at the same time
I give you all of it before we start, not after. If it turns out the printing alone exceeds your budget, I will say what to do first and what to postpone — it can usually be staged without wasting the first instalment.
Who owns the logo you paid for
A question almost nobody asks at the quoting stage, and one that can come back two years later. It happens that a designer hands over export files only, while the rights and the source files stay with them — and the next piece of material, or a change of supplier, means buying them back.
With me the copyright passes to you with the final payment, and you end up with source files, exports for every use, and written rules, and if a website was built, all the access details and passwords too. No surcharges and no coming back to me for every business card. I do not keep clients on a leash with their own files — that is convenient for the designer and expensive for the company.
Ask everyone you talk to about this, not just me.
A freelancer or an agency
Honestly, including when the agency wins.
One person is cheaper, because there is no office or team to cover, and faster, because nothing is handed between departments. You talk to the person who draws. There is one real drawback: one person is one pair of hands — for "all of it by next week", or a project with a dozen materials at once, that is a limit you cannot work around.
An agency makes sense when you need market research, workshops with your team, name testing or several markets at once. For a small service business in Poland that is almost never the case, and then you pay for a structure you will not use.
If your project is a mark, materials and a website for a company serving customers in one city, one person is the right choice. If you are entering three markets, I will tell you to go to an agency.
What drives the price
How many materials have to be made. The mark alone is one thing. The mark plus a gate banner, a customer card, stickers and a voucher is five times the drawing.
Whether something has to be carried over. A company with twenty years of history and a recognisable colour is harder work than a blank page — because the job is to refresh, not to discard.
Whether we shoot photographs. Stock images are visible a mile off and nobody believes them, but a session is a separate cost and a separate day.
When it is not worth it
When the mark is recognised. If customers know your logo and the real problem is that your website never states a price, changing the mark fixes nothing and cuts you off from what you have already built. You will hear that from me instead of a quote.
When you have no customers yet. A brand organises and amplifies what exists. It does not create demand. In a company's first year the money usually works harder in a Google listing and photographs than in brand guidelines.
When the budget stretches to one thing. Then doing the Google listing and the photographs properly almost always beats a new logo nobody will see.
How I know it pays off
From one concrete case I can show you. A car park by Katowice Airport had a logotype of nearly 4:1 proportions — it worked in a page header and stopped working on the gate, on a sticker and as an avatar in Google.
After the brand and the website were rebuilt: 12–14% click-through in search against a market average of 3–5%, and over half the traffic from Google, organically, with no advertising budget. The full case study.
That is one case, not a rule. But it is measurable and verifiable, which in this trade is rare — I went through dozens of competitors' offers and not one quoted a single number for the result.
Where to start
Get in touch and send me the address of your website or your Google listing — I will tell you what I would fix first and what I would leave alone. I reply within a day, and the first half hour of conversation is free.
If you are wondering whether it is worth it at all, I wrote up separately why an old brand costs you customers — with research, not hunches.
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