What product design actually costs
The first question every client has and the one designers dodge. What you are paying for, what moves the number up and down, and how to tell whether a quote is honest before you accept it.
Nobody puts prices on a design portfolio, and everybody wants them. You are here because you have a thing that needs designing and no idea whether that is a two thousand pound job or a twenty thousand pound one.
I cannot quote your project in a blog post. What I can do is explain what the number is made of, so that when you get a quote you can tell whether it was thought about or guessed.
You are not buying screens
This is the part that catches people out. A quote that looks expensive for "12 screens" is usually not pricing the screens at all.
Screens are the cheap part. What takes the time is deciding what the screens should be: what the real problem is, what happens when something fails, what a person sees when there is no data yet, what the thing does at the edges where most products quietly break.
I have watched a brief for "a better tool" turn out to be a problem that needed no new tool at all, five times over on Indian farms. The drawing was never the expensive bit. Working out what to draw was.
The four things that move the number
How much is already decided. If you know your users, have a working product and want one feature designed, that is a small, cheap, well-shaped job. If the answer to "who is this for" is still being argued about internally, the first part of the work is that argument, and it costs real time.
How many surfaces. One web app is one job. A web app and an Android app that must never disagree with each other is more than two jobs, because the work is in the agreement. I have built exactly that, and the expensive part was keeping one shared model underneath both, not drawing twice.
How new the problem is. A checkout flow has been solved thousands of times and you are buying craft. Something genuinely unusual has no reference to copy, and you are buying the attempts that do not work as well as the one that does. The annotation cards on one of my projects took eleven passes. Ten of those were the cost of the eleventh.
Who has to agree. A project with one decision-maker moves. A project with four moves at the speed of the slowest reviewer, and that time is real whether or not anybody bills for it.
A rough shape, in time rather than money
Rates vary enormously by market, so any number I give you is wrong somewhere. Time is more portable:
- An audit of something that already exists: days, not weeks. You get a ranked list of what is wrong and what to fix first.
- One feature, inside a product that already exists: one to three weeks, depending on how much of it is genuinely new.
- A product from nothing to something you can build: months. Research, structure, the interface, and the edge cases nobody thinks about until they are live.
Multiply by whatever a day costs where you are hiring. That is the honest version of a price list.
What an honest quote looks like
It has a scope you can read. Not "UX design services" but a list of what is included and, more importantly, what is not. If nobody has told you what is out of scope, nothing is out of scope, and that is how projects go wrong for both sides.
It has a shape, not just a total. Phases, or a first chunk with a decision point at the end. A single number for six months of work is a guess wearing a suit.
It says what happens when things change. They will. A quote that pretends otherwise has priced in the argument you are going to have later.
It can be smaller. Any designer worth hiring can tell you the cheaper version of your project and what you lose by taking it. If the only option offered is the biggest one, ask for the small one and see what comes back.
The cheapest mistake to avoid
Paying for a redesign when you needed a diagnosis.
Redesigning a product because it feels tired is the most expensive way to find out that the problem was one confusing step in the middle. An audit costs a fraction of a redesign and quite often tells you that you do not need one.
What to do before you ask anyone for a price
Write down, in plain words, what is going wrong and who it is going wrong for. Not the solution you have in mind, the problem underneath it. Anyone good will price that far more accurately than they can price a feature list, and you will get much better answers from everyone you ask.
If you want to try that on me, send me the problem rather than the brief. I will tell you honestly what I think it needs, including when the answer is less than you expected.