Free tool
Design cost calculator
Three ways to buy design work produce three very different monthly bills. Enter your workload and rates below to see freelancers, agency retainers, and a design subscription side by side.
Logos, posts, decks, web updates — any finished deliverable.
Typical simple requests take 2–4 hours; complex ones 8+.
$
Mid-level designers commonly charge $40–$90/hour.
$
Typical small-agency retainers start around $2,000–$5,000.
$
DesignFlow starts at $499/month for unlimited requests.
Freelancers
$1,800
per month
Pay-as-you-go per request
Agency retainer
$3,000
per month
Fixed monthly, scoped hours
$2,501/mo more than the cheapest option
Design subscription · Cheapest
$499
per month
Unlimited requests, flat fee
How to read this estimate
- Freelancers scale with volume: 30 hours/month × your hourly rate. Every revision round and brief rewrite adds hours.
- Agency retainers are fixed but scoped — hours beyond the retainer are billed at higher overage rates, and small jobs often wait for senior time.
- Subscriptions are the flat monthly fee you enter, whether you send one request or thirty — the trade-off is throughput (usually one or two active requests at a time).
- This is an estimate, not a quote: rates vary by designer, location, and project complexity. Use it to compare models, not to negotiate a specific freelancer.
How to choose with confidence
- Under ~8 design hours a month? Per-project freelancing is usually the cheapest and simplest. The math changes as soon as the workload becomes steady.
- Steady weekly work? A subscription's flat fee usually undercuts the equivalent freelance hours while adding guaranteed turnaround and unlimited revisions.
- A flagship launch or rebrand? One-time agency depth earns its premium when the stakes are high — then move the ongoing work to a cheaper model.