Why agency pricing is a phone number
Before we started this studio we did something slightly rude. We called twelve design studios, described a real project honestly, and asked one question: roughly what does something like this cost with you? Eleven of twelve would not give a range. Nine of the eleven asked for our budget first.
The one that answered gave a band about three times as wide as ours is now, said it depended mostly on how many markets were involved, and offered to talk if that was in the right area. The call took four minutes. We did not work with them and we have recommended them twice since.
Why studios do it
The reasons are real, and it is worth stating them at their strongest, because a piece like this is worthless if it knocks over a strawman.
Anchoring is a genuine effect. A published number becomes the number, and every conversation afterwards is a negotiation down from it. If a studio's work genuinely ranges from forty thousand to four hundred, publishing forty means half its enquiries arrive expecting forty.
Scope really does vary. Two projects that sound identical in a first email can differ by a factor of five once you know how many markets, how many sub-brands, how much existing research and how many people have to approve. A number without those variables is not information, it is a guess with false precision.
A figure without context does frighten people. Somebody who has never bought design before hears eighty thousand euros and hears it against their salary rather than against the cost of the last time their brand went wrong. Context genuinely helps, and a meeting is a good way to give it.
And publishing low loses you the work you are best at. A studio whose most interesting projects are its largest has an incentive to keep the ceiling invisible.
| What we were told | How often |
|---|---|
| "It depends entirely on scope" | Nine of twelve |
| "What budget did you have in mind?" | Nine of twelve |
| "Let's book a call to explore it properly" | Eleven of twelve |
| An actual number, unprompted | One of twelve |
What it costs
The buyer's cost is obvious and gets talked about: three meetings before a figure, and often a fourth before a proposal. For someone who needs a number in a budget line by Friday, that is not a process, it is a refusal.
The cost to the studio is less obvious and considerably larger. Every one of those eleven spent an hour of senior time on us, and we were never going to be their client — we were two people about to start a competitor. Hidden pricing does not filter for good-fit clients. It filters for patient clients, which is a completely different quality and correlates with nothing useful.
There is a third cost that nobody counts. When a whole category refuses to publish, buyers assume the worst, and the assumption is usually wrong in the expensive direction: people who could comfortably afford a studio decide not to ask.
What we did instead
We publish a band. That alone would be worse than useless, so two other things had to be true to make it honest.
The duration is fixed, at nine weeks. A published range is only a promise if the thing behind it has a shape — otherwise it is a starting price, which is the thing this piece is complaining about wearing a different hat.
And there is a stated way out at week three: stop, pay for three weeks, keep everything made so far. A fixed price with no exit is a worse deal than a quote, because the buyer carries all the risk of being wrong about us. Four clients out of sixty-one have taken it.
The three only work together. Publishing a price without fixing the duration is marketing; fixing the duration without an exit is a trap; offering an exit without publishing the price changes nothing, because they still could not get the number.