How much does brand identity cost?
Brand identity costs from about $1,000 to $30,000 or more, and the spread is what sits under the mark. A logo with a palette and type runs $1,000 to $5,000 from an independent designer. A full identity, with signed strategy, guidelines, and the files every vendor needs, runs $5,000 to $20,000 at a boutique and $15,000 to $80,000 at a studio. National agencies start near $80,000. The price buys the decisions, not the drawing.
The ranges come from what shops publish, and the shape is the same everywhere. The bottom of the market sells a mark with colors and a typeface, two or three concepts, a few rounds, in two to four weeks. The middle adds the decisions the mark expresses: a written positioning the client signs before any drawing, guidelines a vendor can follow without a phone call, and a file set that survives the print shop and the sign shop. The top adds strategy workshops, voice and messaging, and rollout. Each step up is not a better logo. It is more of the brand written down, so that the next designer, the next hire, and the next vendor produce work that still looks like the company. That is why a logo alone is priced on a different scale, and why the cheapest identity costs the most when it has to be done again.
Where this matters
Not every business needs the middle or the top. Brand as identity earns its price where buyers choose between near-equals on trust or feel: consumer businesses, hospitality, retail, professional firms competing for the same referral. A contractor with a truck and a reputation needs a mark that holds up on a wrap and an invoice, and should pay for that and no more. The honest question is how much of the brand has to be written down for other people to carry it. The more hands the brand passes through, the more the identity has to hold, and the more it is worth paying to have it decided once.
The practice posts its own numbers: brand identity design in four packages, from a mark mastered and owned for $1,500 to the full brand book, with the process and the windows published beside the prices.