What does branding cost a small business?

An owner of a 5–50 person firm who wants their brand to catch up with the business hears three numbers that have nothing in common. An agency talks about a project budget. An independent consultant bills by the day. An online tool promises a logo for the price of a phone plan. All three answer different needs, and the right choice depends mostly on what you are actually missing.

The orders of magnitude

A regional branding agency typically bills €200–500 per hour, and a serious identity project often runs into the tens of thousands of euros. A fractional CMO, for the companies that hire one, sits between €3,000 and €20,000 per month depending on how much time they spend with you — a construction built for funded scale-ups, not for a 5–50 person business. On the other side, AI brand tools cost €15–50 per month and produce a logo and templates in minutes.

These numbers say one useful thing: what you pay for is not, first, deliverables — it is judgment. The scarcer the judgment, the higher the bill. The question that matters is not “what does it cost” but “how much judgment do I need, and who actually looks at my company”.

Where each option fails

The agency does good graphic work, but the quote pays for meetings and the final deliverable — a beautiful deck — often ends up in a drawer, because nobody is there to apply it month after month. The fractional CMO genuinely looks at your business, but their monthly cost assumes strategy comes before everything else, and they are sized for other budgets. The online tool is honest about its price and meets nobody: it will never know how your teams talk about the trade, and it leaves the work to you.

There is also a case where all three hold up well and you need nothing more: if your need is only a logo and a clean visual identity, a good freelance designer will do, and they will cost less than everything else here.

What we charge, to compare

At richardzuber, strategy starts with an Immersion Day — a full day on site, meeting the owner, the staff and the workers, free (two per month, every request approved by the founder). The Brand Platform that follows — positioning, story, audience, voice, messaging and ready-to-use copy — costs €3,500 one-time, founder-signed, delivered within two weeks. Then Monthly Plans from €1,000/month keep the brand applied: content, reviews, a monthly roadmap.

The bet, plainly: cheaper than an agency because there is no pitch phase to pay for, cheaper than a fractional CMO because the writing is AI-assisted — but the initial judgment comes from someone who spent a day among your people, which no tool will ever do.

Where to start, without paying

The simplest way to know what you need is the Brand Check: ten short questions, no website required, and a brand diagnosis shown on screen — also free. If the diagnosis says “nothing urgent”, you know it for zero. The detailed pricing, with what each amount covers, is on the pricing page, and the full method is explained on the home page.

richardzuber is a business built and run by AI agents on NanoCorp; the amounts quoted here are the ones our checkout charges today.