A professional logo costs $300 to $2,000 with most freelance designers, $3,000 to $10,000 or more with a full-service agency, and anywhere from free to $50 with a DIY tool. None of those numbers is wrong. They’re pricing different things: a file, or a system.
Here’s the part that trips up most small business owners. The logo file itself is the cheapest part of any of these packages. What you’re actually paying for is the thinking that happens before the file exists: figuring out who the business is competing against, what a customer needs to feel in the first three seconds, and how the mark holds up on a truck door, a Google Business Profile photo, and a favicon at 16 pixels.
What does a logo actually cost in 2026?
Here’s the range broken down by who’s doing the work.
DIY tools and AI generators: $0 to $50. Canva’s free tier and its AI logo maker, along with dedicated logo generator sites, produce a usable mark in minutes. Canva Pro runs about $18 USD a month if you want the premium templates and brand kit features. These tools are fine for a side project, a farmers market table, or testing a name before you commit further.
Freelance designers: $300 to $2,000. Entry-level freelancers charge $300 to $500 for one to three concepts and a round or two of revisions. Designers with more experience charge $500 to $1,500. At $1,000 to $2,500 you’re typically getting a discovery brief, competitor research, several concepts, multiple revision rounds, vector files, colour variations, and a light style guide.
Design marketplaces (99designs and similar contest platforms): roughly $250 to $1,300. These run as contests: you post a brief, dozens of designers submit concepts, and you pick a winner. Package tiers scale with how many designers get access to your brief and how many concepts you receive.
Full-service agencies: $3,000 to $10,000-plus. This tier is rarely “a logo.” It’s a brand identity project: positioning work, a full mark plus wordmark and icon variations, a colour system, typography, and a style guide that covers web, print, vehicle wraps, and signage. A realistic logo-only project, done properly with discovery, three concepts, and two revision rounds, is 15 to 30 hours of work, which is where the freelancer and agency price floors come from.
Is a free or $20 logo maker good enough for a real business?
For a real, ongoing business, usually not, for one specific reason: file limitations. A logo maker or AI tool typically hands you a PNG or JPG, not the layered, scalable vector file (an .ai, .eps, or .svg) a printer, sign shop, or future designer will ask for. Without a vector file, every future use, a banner, a vehicle wrap, a trade show backdrop, means recreating the logo from scratch or paying to have it redrawn.
There’s a second issue: originality. AI logo generators pull from limited pattern libraries, so a distinctive-looking mark can turn out to be one a competitor two towns over is already using. That’s a real risk if you ever want to register it as a trademark, since a confusingly similar mark already in use can block your application.
If you’re testing a business idea before you know it’ll stick, a free tool is the right call. Once you have paying customers and a name you’re committing to, the vector file and the originality both start to matter.
What’s the difference between a logo and a full brand identity?
A logo is one asset: a mark, maybe with a wordmark. A brand identity is the system that mark lives inside, colour palette with hex codes, font pairings, photography direction, tone of voice, and rules for how the logo behaves on a dark background versus a light one. Our guide to what belongs in a small business brand style guide breaks down exactly what that document needs and what you can skip.
This is the real reason agency packages cost more than a solo freelancer’s logo-only project. You’re not paying more for the same file, you’re paying for a bigger deliverable. If your business is a single storefront with one owner making every design call, a style guide can be two or three pages. If you’re a two-owner business planning to open a second location, or you already have a designer, a marketing person, and a social media contractor working from different files, the system pays for itself the first time someone doesn’t have to ask “what shade of blue do we use.”
Should you trademark your logo, and what does that cost?
A logo file and a registered trademark are two different things, and confusing them is an expensive mistake. Designing a logo, even a great one, gives you no legal right to stop someone else from using something similar. Only a registered trademark does that.
In Canada, trademark applications go through the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO). Filing online costs roughly $491 CAD for the first class of goods or services, plus about $149 CAD for each additional class, and CIPO has flagged a small fee increase for January 2027. Filing by mail or fax costs more than filing online. That fee is separate from any design cost and separate from a paid clearance search or a trademark agent’s fee if you use one.
If your business name and logo matter to your long-term brand, and especially if you’re planning to franchise, license, or expand outside Ontario, budget for both the design and the registration. If you’re a single-location service business, the ServiceOntario business name registration most owners already have is a different, cheaper step, and it does not replace a trademark. We cover that distinction in our guide to choosing a business name in Ontario.
What actually determines whether a logo is worth the price?
Three things, not the sticker price alone.
How many concepts and revisions are included. A $300 package with one concept and one revision round is a different product than a $1,500 package with three concepts and two rounds. Ask before you pay, not after you see the first draft.
What files you walk away with. A finished project should hand you vector source files, not just a PNG. Ask specifically for an .ai, .eps, or .svg file, plus a PNG and a favicon-sized icon.
Whether discovery happened at all. A designer who asks about your competitors, your ideal customer, and where the logo will actually appear, on a van, a sign, a website header, before sketching anything, is doing work a $20 generator can’t. That’s the gap between a logo that looks fine in isolation and one that reads as an established, trustworthy business the first time a stranger in Kitchener-Waterloo or Guelph sees your Google Business Profile.
Where to start
If you’re not sure which tier fits your business, start with what the logo needs to survive: a sign shop, a print run, a website header, a social profile photo, and eventually maybe a trademark filing. Work backward from that list to a budget, not the other way around.
Skroll builds logos as part of a full branding and design engagement, priced against the actual scope, not a flat package. Our pricing page lays out how projects are scoped, or you can get in touch with what you’re working with and we’ll tell you plainly whether you need a logo, a full identity system, or neither yet.
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