The honest cost of unintentional design

The pitch sounds reasonable. A founder needs a brand. A designer on Upwork can produce something serviceable for under five thousand dollars. The logo lands within a week. The team moves on. The “branding problem” is solved.

It almost never is.

What you actually paid for

Cheap brand work isn’t bad work. It’s bounded work. The deliverable is a logo file. Maybe a pair of brand colors and a typeface. What it cannot deliver — what no fixed-price three-day engagement can deliver — is a position. A point of view. A reason your brand should exist alongside the seventeen other companies competing for the same buyer.

That gap shows up in everything downstream. Every landing page now requires a writer to invent a voice. Every investor deck has a tonal personality of its own. Every piece of content reads like it came from a different company, because it did. Each downstream asset bears the cost of the missing decision.

The compounding bill

The first time we sat with a client to redo a brand they’d shipped twelve months earlier, we asked what the original engagement had cost. Three thousand. The redo? Forty-six thousand, plus eight months of marketing output that had to be entirely retrofitted to the new identity, plus a Series A that the partners later told them they almost didn’t lead because the brand “felt off.”

The cheap brand wasn’t three thousand dollars. It was three thousand plus forty-six thousand plus eight months plus a Series A scare. Cheap wasn’t cheap.

What “expensive” buys

What you’re buying when you pay for thoughtful brand work is not a logo. It’s the discovery that goes into the logo. The interrogation of what the company is for. The synthesis of competitor positioning. The rigorous decision about what tone of voice you can live with for the next decade. The logo is the artifact of that thinking. Without the thinking, the artifact is a placeholder you’ll replace.

If you can afford to replace it, replace it. If you can’t — if the position you’re building requires brand consistency over the next ten quarters — pay for the work that makes consistency possible.