The honest answer to "what does a design subscription cost" is that the number is the least useful part of the comparison.
Studios in this market price between roughly £2,000 and £10,000 a month, and two studios at £4,500 can be selling genuinely different things. One is a single designer splitting their week between four clients. The other is a senior designer and a senior developer working one thing at a time until it ships.
This post is what actually drives that number, so you can read a price and know what is behind it.
The bands, and what each one buys
Roughly £2,000 to £3,000 a month
Design only, one person, usually part of their week rather than a dedicated lane. Good for marketing design: social assets, landing pages, presentation decks, brand collateral.
You will get work back quickly because the work is small. What you will not get is anyone who can build what they designed, which means you still need a developer somewhere.
Roughly £3,000 to £5,000 a month
Either a stronger designer with real product experience, or a designer plus some development capacity. This is the band most funded early-stage products sit in, and it is where the promises start to vary most between studios.
The question that separates them: is development included, and is it senior? A subscription that designs screens and hands you a Figma file has moved the bottleneck rather than removed it.
Roughly £5,000 to £8,000 a month
Design and senior development together, enough to run a product continuously — features, fixes, infrastructure, integrations, not just screens.
Our plan sits here at £4,500 a month, slightly under the band, because we are two founders doing the work rather than a studio with a management layer to fund.
£8,000 and up
A dedicated pod: full-time people, yours alone. Worth it when your queue genuinely needs two or more things moving at once, permanently. Rarely the right answer before that point, and most studios will sell it to you anyway.
The five things that actually set the price
Price follows these. Everything else is positioning.
Who does the work. A named senior doing it themselves costs more than an account manager briefing a junior, and is worth more by a wider margin than the price difference suggests. Ask for names, and ask whether those names change in month six.
How many things move at once. One active request is what keeps a price in the four-figure range. Two is roughly double the capacity and prices accordingly. Any studio promising unlimited simultaneous work is selling you a queue with extra steps, because capacity is people.
Whether development is included. Design-only is the cheaper half. The expensive half is the person who makes it real, keeps it running and gets called when it breaks at eleven at night.
What the turnaround commitment really says. "48-hour turnaround" usually means design, measured as an average, not a guarantee on any single item. That is a reasonable promise. A fixed turnaround on development is not a promise anyone can keep honestly, and a studio offering one is either padding estimates or about to miss them.
What happens at the end. Pause terms, cancellation notice, and whether the work transfers to you. A cheaper subscription that licences the work back to you is not cheaper.
Against the two alternatives
Hiring
A senior product designer and a senior developer in-house come to roughly £115,000 to £130,000 a year once you add employer's National Insurance and pension. Before that you spend about three months finding them, and there is a recruiter fee and a notice period at the other end if it does not work.
A subscription at £4,500 a month is £54,000 a year and starts this week.
The comparison is not quite like for like, and anyone presenting it as if it were is selling. You are not buying two full-time people. You are buying a lane that ships continuously — roughly two developer-days and one design-day a week. For most funded products that is the thing actually needed. If you need eighty hours a week of product work, hire, and we will tell you so.
Per-project agencies
Four to ten thousand pounds a project reads cheaper until you count the parts nobody quotes: the proposal, the two-to-six-week gap before anyone starts, the change orders when the brief meets reality, and the fact that the team has moved on by the time version two is needed.
The second version then costs nearly what the first did, because somebody has to learn your codebase again. We wrote about why we stopped selling that way in a product team on subscription.
How to work out which band you need
Three questions, in this order.
Does your product change every week? If it does not, a subscription is the wrong purchase and you want a fixed project. We sell a two-week kickoff sprint at £1,950 for exactly this case.
Do you need the thing built, or only designed? If built, anything without senior development included is a false economy, however good the price looks.
Does more than one thing need to move at once, permanently? If not, one active request is the band you want, and paying for two is paying for capacity you will not use.
What ours costs
£4,500 a month: a senior designer and a senior developer, one request at a time, unlimited queue, typically four to eight requests a month, 48 hours average on design, pause or cancel any month, code and design yours.
Pay quarterly for 5% off, six-monthly for 10%. A few places open each month at £3,500 a month for the first six months, applied at the checkout with nothing to type.
The full breakdown, including the cases where we will tell you not to buy it, is on the plan page. If you would rather just ask, thirty minutes and we will tell you which band you need, including when that band is not us.
