Ask ten designers what a logo costs in the Philippines and you will get ten different numbers, from ₱500 to half a million pesos. That spread is not designers being greedy or generous. It is that the word "logo" is doing very different work at each end of it, and nobody says so out loud.
This is a plain breakdown of what changes as the price goes up, what you actually receive at each level, and the costs that only show up months later when the cheap logo turns out not to fit on a tarpaulin. If you are about to hire someone, read the last two sections before you send any money.
Why the same job has ten different prices
A logo is not one thing. At the bottom of the market you are buying a picture. In the middle you are buying a decision that somebody thought about, plus the files that make it usable everywhere. At the top you are buying research, and the logo is what falls out at the end of it.
The other thing that moves the price is time. A designer who spends two hours on your mark has to charge for two hours. One who spends three days studying your competitors, sketching, testing it small, and building out every file format has to charge for three days. Neither is wrong. They are not selling the same thing.
The free AI logo
The newest bottom of the market costs nothing. Type your business name into ChatGPT, Canva or any logo generator and a dozen marks appear in under a minute. For trying out a name, or picturing a page before you open, that is genuinely useful.
What comes out is a picture, not a set of files. It is usually one flat image with no vector version, no one-colour version and no white one, and you cannot edit it cleanly: ask for a small change and you tend to get a different logo. It is also drawn from the same patterns everyone else is prompting, so the milk tea shop two towns over may already have something very close to yours.
Nobody has checked it against your competitors or tested it small on a receipt. Use it the way you would use a sketch, to show a designer what you like. Do not paint it on a sign.
The ₱500 to ₱2,000 logo
This is the marketplace and Facebook-group tier. You send your business name, and a day later a logo arrives. It looks finished. For a lot of businesses starting out with nothing, it is genuinely better than nothing.
What usually happens behind the scenes is that a stock icon gets paired with a free font. There is no research, often no second concept, and the file you receive is a JPG or a PNG at whatever size the designer happened to export. That is the whole transaction, and at that price it has to be.
The risk is not that it looks bad. Plenty of them look fine on a phone. The risk is what you cannot do with it afterwards: no vector file means no signage, no embroidery, no large-format printing without it going fuzzy. And a stock icon is licensed to everyone who bought it, so the same mark may already be on a business two towns over, and you cannot register it as a trademark.
The ₱3,000 to ₱30,000 range
This is where working studios live, and where most small and medium Filipino businesses should be looking. At this level somebody actually studies your business before drawing: who buys from you, what your competitors already look like, where the mark has to survive.
You get more than one direction to choose from, real revisions rather than a single take-it-or-leave-it file, and a set of exports that covers the things a business actually runs into. Full colour, one colour, white for dark backgrounds, vector source files, and sizes that work from a Facebook profile picture up to a store sign.
At the upper end of this band the logo stops arriving on its own. You get the system around it: the colours written down as codes rather than described, the fonts named and licensed, and a page or two saying how to use it so the next person who touches it does not undo the work.
The six-figure agency project
Agencies charge ₱100,000 and up because they are not selling a logo. They are selling the work that comes before one: customer interviews, market studies, positioning, naming, sometimes a full brand strategy document, and a team of people rather than one designer.
For a company opening thirty branches, launching a product line into supermarkets, or raising money, that work pays for itself. For a milk tea shop with one location and a Facebook page, it does not. Nothing about it is a scam. It is simply built for a different size of problem.
What you are actually paying for
Strip away the tiers and the price is buying four things, in roughly this order of importance.
Thinking. Someone deciding what your business should look like rather than what is quickest to draw. Time. Concepts drawn and thrown away, tested small, tried in one colour. Files. The formats that make the mark usable on every surface you will ever need, not just the one you asked about. Ownership. A written handover saying the mark is yours, drawn for you, and not licensed to anybody else.
The fourth one is the one people forget to ask about and the only one that cannot be fixed later.
The cost you only find out about later
A cheap logo is rarely expensive on the day you buy it. It gets expensive at the point where it has to leave the phone screen.
The signmaker asks for a vector file and you do not have one, so the mark has to be redrawn before the sign can be cut. The tarpaulin printer sends back a proof where the thin lines have vanished. The embroiderer cannot stitch a gradient, so your uniform gets a version of the logo you never approved. The packaging supplier needs it in one colour and nobody ever made one.
Each of those is a small bill on its own. Together, with a full set of business cards, a shop sign, uniforms and packaging to redo, a ₱1,000 logo can quietly turn into tens of thousands of pesos of reprints and re-cuts, and a few weeks of your time chasing them. That is the real number to compare against, not the invoice.
What has to be in the deal, at any price
Whatever you decide to spend, make sure all six of these are agreed in writing before you pay anything:
- Vector source files — AI, EPS, PDF or SVG — not only JPG or PNG exports.
- A one-colour version that survives rubber stamps, engraving, embroidery and cheap printing.
- A white or knockout version for dark backgrounds and photographs.
- Your colours written as codes: HEX for screens, CMYK for printing, and a Pantone if you will ever print offset.
- The names of the fonts used, and whether the licence covers you using them yourself.
- A plain line saying the artwork is original, is yours, and is not resold to anyone else.
How to get a better price without paying less
Most of the money in a logo project is spent on going backwards. A designer guesses, you say not quite, they guess again. Every round of that is time somebody is charging for.
The single biggest thing you can do is turn up with a brief. Who buys from you and why. Three businesses whose look you admire and three you do not, with a sentence each on why. Every place the logo has to appear, including the awkward ones: the delivery van, the receipt, the embroidered polo. What you absolutely do not want.
A designer who has that in front of them can go straight at the answer. In our experience it is worth more than any amount of haggling, and it usually produces a better mark as well as a shorter project.
How we price it
We publish our prices rather than quote every job from scratch, because a food cart and a corporate rebrand are different jobs and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
A Starter logo is ₱2,999: two original concepts, five revision rounds, full colour, one-colour and white versions, and the vector files to use them. Business identity is ₱4,999 and adds the system around the mark: a third concept, the stacked, wide and icon versions, and your colours and fonts. The Premium brand kit is ₱7,999 and adds a one-page brand guide and your social media profiles, set up to match.
Business cards, menus, signs and everything else are priced on their own, from ₱999. None of our prices include printing: that depends on how many you need and what they are printed on, so our print partner quotes it once your design is approved.
Anything outside that, a rebrand or a group of brands under one owner, we quote properly after a conversation. Either way you get the vector files, the one-colour version and the ownership in writing, because those are not extras.
Common questions
- How much should a small business in the Philippines pay for a logo?
- For most small and medium businesses, somewhere between ₱3,000 and ₱30,000 is the range where you get original work, real revisions and every file format you will need. Below about ₱2,000, or from a free AI tool, you are usually buying a picture rather than a set of files, which is fine to start with but limits what you can print later. Above ₱100,000 you are paying for market research and strategy, which is worth it at scale and rarely worth it for a single location.
- Is a ₱500 logo from Facebook ever a good idea?
- It can be, if you know what you are buying. If you need something on a page tomorrow and you accept that you may pay to have it redrawn when you order signage or uniforms, it is a reasonable stopgap. Just do not print it on anything expensive, and do not build a trademark application on it, because a stock icon is licensed to everyone else who bought it too.
- What files should I get when I pay for a logo?
- At minimum: a vector source file (AI, EPS, PDF or SVG), transparent PNGs at a few sizes, a one-colour version, a white version for dark backgrounds, and your colours written out as HEX and CMYK codes. Without the vector file, signmakers, embroiderers and large-format printers all have to redraw your logo before they can use it.
- Why do I need a one-colour version if my logo is full colour?
- Because a lot of the places your logo ends up cannot print colour. Rubber stamps, official receipts, embroidery, engraving, foil, silkscreen on shirts and single-colour tarpaulins all need a version built for one ink. If nobody makes one for you, whoever is doing the job will make one themselves, and you will not see it until it arrives.
- Do I own the logo I paid for?
- Only if it says so. Ask for a line in writing that the artwork is original, that ownership transfers to you on final payment, and that it is not resold to anyone else. This matters if you ever want to register it with the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines, because you cannot register a stock icon that a thousand other buyers also licensed.
- How long should a logo take?
- A working studio usually needs one to two weeks: a few days to study your business and draw, then rounds of revisions with you. Same-day logos exist, and they are same-day because the thinking step was skipped. If you are on a deadline, say so at the start rather than compressing the revisions at the end.
