| $10000+ is the "domain of big-budget agencies"? What exact kind of work are we talking about here? Certainly not websites...that are any good... :) Maybe that's the problem I had with this post--no project parameters are visible. Because it's not like you can walk into a big-budget agency and they say, "for $10,000 we can build you either a logo or an app. But not both." When you walk into a big-budget agency, you will be lucky if you can get penciled onto their calendar in about a month. When you walk into a small agency, they'll meet with you right there for a few minutes, then probably never call you back because demand is too high and you sound like a cheap client, asking where your $10,000 will get you. Now, for low-end small agencies, the reverse is true. They will never call you back because they can't figure out why someone would pay $10K for design, and it scares them. I have seen that happen. When you chat up a highly-skilled individual freelancer, he/she will immediately try to figure out which you value more: Good design or budget integrity. High-value freelancers, working as individuals, are known to take on projects of $50K and higher. They have a great reputation and are hired by people who are good delegators with a need to solve a distant problem effectively. Demand for high-value, professional design services is extremely high. Here at HN the startup culture is always squawking about the cost of design, but the demand really is there. For every "I am willing to pay you $XXXX for a website" phone call I get, I can invent 2-3 opportunities of my own to contact existing clients and sell them on an idea that will cost them $XX,XXX. This is not some secret where I am keeping them from discovering cheap designers. It's how professional design works. I know their business. I pitch an idea that makes them stand out. They go after it. Anyway, telling people that they can (or should) hire a big-budget agency with their $10K is pretty misleading. |
But in my experience it's the upper bound of most initial design budgets on Folyo, that's why I picked that number.