Brand identity design: €99 or €10,000?

In the Netherlands, brand identity design costs a fixed €99 to €1,500 or a price on request, according to a count of thirteen providers by Oase Creative on 5 October 2026 that found no published price above that.

Brand identity design: what does it cost?

Brand identity design costs a few hundred euros, or whatever is in a quote. In between, there is almost nothing online. We found that out on 5 October 2026, when we looked at thirteen pages from providers that rank in the Netherlands for "huisstijl laten ontwerpen", the Dutch search for having a brand identity designed. Logo providers name a fixed price from ninety-nine euros and deliver in days. Packages with a fixed price stop at around fifteen hundred euros. Everything above that is called "quote", with a lead time of weeks.

The ten thousand euros in the title does not come from our count. It is what 75 to 92 hours of agency work costs at the average rates of BNO, the Dutch association of designers, depending on whether you use the strategy or the design rate. It shows where the bill goes when someone makes the decisions around the logo as well as the logo itself.

The difference between those two amounts is not the quality of the drawing. A good designer can make a fine logo for little money. It sits in four things a budget logo does not include in the price: the strategy under the logo, the rights to what you get, whether it works everywhere your brand has to appear, and whether it is still the same brand a year from now.

Below is what we found, why the market is split like this, and how to decide part by part what you need. We are a brand agency ourselves, so read this with that interest in mind. You can check the count and the sources yourself.

What did we find at thirteen brand identity providers?

We took the five pages at the top for "huisstijl laten ontwerpen" and added eight pages from a second search. For each page we noted three things: is there a price, what is the lead time, and does it include a brand book or manual. That let us place twelve of the thirteen providers in a segment. We leave the names out. The point is the pattern, not who charges what.

Three of the five highest-ranking pages name no price. Someone searching for what a brand identity costs mostly gets a contact form at the top. The most expensive fixed price we found is a brand identity package of fifteen hundred euros, and above that we saw no amount anywhere. And two budget providers sell themselves with "no AI, made by hand". So even at the cheap end, the competitor is no longer another designer but a free generator.

Keep in mind that this is a snapshot of one day. Some prices are sale prices, and what ranks at the top differs by location and by search engine. It is a count, not market research. But the pattern is clear enough: there is a market for a logo as a product, and a market for a brand as a project. A published price for strategy, identity and brand book together, we found nowhere.

Why is there no middle in the market?

Because the two sides sell different things. The cheap side sells a file. The expensive side sells hours. You can price a file, because you know what you deliver: a logo, a few variants, sometimes a colour code. You can only price hours once you know what has to happen, and an agency only knows that after the first conversation.

For those hours there is an independent reference point. According to the BNO Branchemonitor 2025, agencies charge an average of €109 per hour for design work and €132 per hour for strategic work. It is the only public Dutch rate benchmark we found that does not come from a single agency. BNO adds two caveats itself: the figures cover 2023, and this time the results are not representative of the whole sector, because fewer designers took part.

Work it out with those rates and ten thousand euros buys you between 75 and 92 hours. That is just over two working weeks for one person. For a brand identity that is only a logo, that is far too much. For a project that starts with the question of who your customer is, and ends with a brand book that a printer, a web developer and a marketer can use without asking questions, it is not strange.

The middle is missing because it is hard to sell. A fixed price for a project means the agency carries the risk if the question turns out bigger than expected. Most agencies don't choose that. Understandable, but it leaves you with two options you cannot put side by side.

What is missing from a logo that costs a few hundred euros?

Not the logo itself. A budget logo can look perfectly fine. What is missing sits around it. Put the packages next to each other and the same things keep dropping out: nobody asks why the brand should look like this, nobody checks where the logo will end up, and nobody tells you what you may and may not do with the files.

That is not a criticism of the providers. For that amount it cannot be done. At a fixed low price, the designer has a few hours at most, and those hours go into drawing. The rest of the work does not disappear. It lands on you.

We see four gaps again and again, and the rest of this article goes through them one by one:

The four gaps are not a verdict on your logo. They are questions you can answer for yourself. If your strategy is already clear, for example because your brand has existed for years and you only want a new mark, the first gap falls away. If you are sure you will never print packaging, the third gets smaller. The question is not whether a budget logo is bad, but which gaps you can close yourself.

Why is a logo without strategy a gamble?

Because a logo only works when it makes something recognisable that is already there. A briefing form asks which colours you like and which logos appeal to you. That produces a logo that fits your taste. Whether it fits your customer, and whether it sets you apart from the competitor who filled in the same form, nobody knows.

Being distinctive is harder than it looks. Ipsos and the agency JKR tested logos, slogans, mascots, colours and products with more than 26,000 respondents. Of those, only 15% of the brand assets tested were truly distinctive, and for colour only 4%. Those are brands with marketing budgets. Choosing a colour because you like it does not make it yours.

Strategy sounds big, but it starts with a few questions that are on no briefing form. Who is the brand for, and who is it not for? What do your competitors already say, and where is there still room? What should someone feel in the three seconds they see your packaging or your listing? Those questions produce choices that steer the design, instead of the other way round. Why a logo and a brand are not the same thing, we wrote up in branding is not a logo.

With us, that is the step before the design: brand positioning, with two or three directions and a reason under each one. You don't have to buy that from us. But if nobody asks those questions, you answer them implicitly yourself, with your taste as the only yardstick.

Can you use a logo made in Canva as your brand?

Not if it is built from Canva content. That is not our opinion, it is in Canva's own terms. The Canva Content License Agreement says it literally in section 9, the list of prohibited uses: you may not use free or paid content "as part of a trade-mark, design-mark, trade-name, business name or service mark". Fonts are excluded from that. A few lines further down, it says you may not claim ownership of, or exclusive rights to, the content.

What does that mean in practice? A logo you put together in an afternoon from a template and a few elements from the library, you can use on your business card. But it is not exclusively yours, and the licence rules out its use as a brand. Anyone can grab the same elements. A shape you draw entirely yourself is not covered by that clause. For most business owners that difference is invisible, and that is exactly where it goes wrong.

That this is not an edge case shows in two providers from our count. One warns in its own price table about the terms around trade mark registration. The other offers to redraw a logo made with AI. Apparently there is enough demand to offer repair as a service. And Canva is big: according to TechCrunch the company had more than 265 million monthly active users.

Rights go further than the mark. Which typeface is in your brand identity, and under which licence? May it be used in your webshop, in an app, in a PDF sent to the printer? We meet brands that after a few years no longer know which licence was ever bought. We wrote about that in typography as a brand asset. A good project gives you a list: which files, which typefaces, which licence, in whose name.

Does your brand identity also work on packaging, a listing and an email?

A logo is usually presented on a white background, large on the screen. You almost never meet it like that in real life. Your brand sits on a thumbnail in a search result, on a box on a shelf, as a favicon in a browser tab, in an email signature, as a profile picture a few centimetres wide. A brand identity that only works in the presentation breaks at the first application.

That is why we design a logo with the smallest placement in mind. It has to work on a 200-pixel thumbnail as well as on a box. That is also how our approach to branding is written down: a logo with variants, a primary and a secondary version, a monogram and a favicon, followed by mock-ups that show how the brand looks on your own product, in your own context.

An example that is public on our site: Screenmate. It started as a nameless product on bol. We built a name, an identity and a forty-page brand book around it, followed by packaging, manuals, listings, photography, 3D and the webshop. Ten services, one visual language. That only works if the identity is designed for all those places from the start, and not for a presentation on white.

There is one more place that did not exist five years ago: AI tools that make content for your brand. They don't read a PDF. They read colour values, typefaces and rules as a file. How that works is in the brand identity becomes machine-readable.

What does a consistent brand identity deliver?

More than you might think, though it is no guarantee. In The Creative Dividend, System1 and Effie linked the creative tests of almost 200,000 people to 1,265 campaigns from the Effie database. In the part on consistency, they looked at brands in the US and the UK over five years. For the least consistent brands, the average return was $2.10 per dollar spent, for the most consistent $8.80. At the same time, brands have become 25% less consistent over the past decade.

Put that in perspective, though. It is a correlation, not proof that consistency is the cause. And Effie cases are success stories that brands submit themselves, so these are brands that were already doing well. But the direction is clear: brands that keep the same position, the same visual language and the same recognition points for years get more out of every euro they spend.

Consistency is the gap you notice last with a budget logo. After delivery you have a file. Who then decides what colour the button on your website gets, what an ad looks like, whether a freelancer may stretch your logo? Without rules, everyone does it slightly differently. After a year you have three versions of your own brand, and none of them is wrong enough to correct.

A brand book only helps if someone actually uses it. In a folder it disappears just as easily as if it had never been made. And if you want to modernise later, that consistency is exactly what you want to protect. How to do that without losing recognition, we described in rebranding without losing recognition.

When is a cheap logo enough?

More often than agencies admit. If you are testing a product and don't know yet whether it will last, a full project is a waste of money. Start small, see whether it sells, and invest in the brand once you know there is something to build.

That is how it works at K&G Goods, the company behind Screenmate. New products first go on bol under the K&G Goods name, with good listings but no brand of their own. What catches on gets its own name and identity. What doesn't gets adjusted or stopped, without an expensive brand disappearing with it. Not every product deserves a brand book before its first sale.

A cheap logo is enough when:

• you are testing an idea and will know within a few months whether it lasts;
• your brand mostly runs through you personally, and your name is the brand;
• you don't print packaging and don't sell on marketplaces;
• you don't want to register the logo as a trade mark.

It gets tight as soon as one of those things changes. You print a thousand boxes. You sell on bol among twenty products that look like yours. A second person joins who makes content. You want to register your brand. At that point you pay the difference anyway, only with an extra step: the old logo has to be phased out first. That costs money and the recognition you had just built.

AI generators make the cheap end of the market even cheaper. That changes nothing about the four gaps. Why a brand then has to be a system, you can read in AI branding: a brand is a system.

How do you compare two quotes for a brand identity?

Don't compare them on the amount, but on what is in them. A quote of three thousand euros that only delivers a logo is more expensive than one of five thousand that also covers the positioning, the rights and the applications. Ask every provider the same eight things:

The question about hours matters most, because you can hold those against the BNO rates. A quote that charges many hours for design but none for strategy tells you where the agency spends its time. A quote without hours tells you nothing.

Also watch for what is not there. No word about typefaces means you will have to chase that yourself. No word about applications means the first box will be a surprise. And if nowhere does it say who guards the brand after delivery, that person is you. Not sure which agencies to ask in the first place? Read what thirty agency headlines say first.

What do we do differently with a brand identity?

We name a price. A brand book with logo, brand guidelines, brand assets, mock-ups and packaging design starts from €4,750 with us, and all amounts are on our prices page.

That is not ten thousand euros, and it is not ninety-nine either. It sits in the gap we found in the count, because we think you should know what you are getting into before you ask for a call. The rest of the project follows the four gaps: first the questions about position and customer, then the design, tested in the places where your brand will really appear, and a brand book with all source files, so your team and your suppliers can carry on with it themselves.

In the first call we always ask two things. Do you need this yet? If you are still testing, we say so, and then a simple logo is the better first step. And what already exists? A brand that has been running for years has recognition you don't just throw away. Then the work starts from what is there, not from a blank page.

What we don't promise you is a brand identity in three days. A logo can be done in three days. A brand that still holds up in five years takes more time, because the decisions underneath take time. The designing is the quick part.

Want to know what your brand identity would cost, or whether you should take that step yet? Tell us where you're stuck. The first call is free, and in it we work out together where you'd best begin.