Hiring a design team can be hard. Whether you’re getting advice from friends, looking on freelancing platforms or doing Google searches, you’ll want to set aside a few hours to get the right designer or team to suit your situation.
Whilst researching for a client, we came across six services that offer unlimited design services for a monthly fee. These services include:
- Design Pickle – $US370 per month or $3,442 per annum for unlimited design services + free stock photos. Has a great software program (Jar HQ) for managing design requests.
- Hue – $US449 per month or $4,548 per annum (branding, website and app design includes for higher month price). Use Hue Coupon Code GENEROUS to get 25% off.
- Fizzy Pixel (unlimited design service for Australia) – $AUD350 per month for the basics and higher-priced plans for social media graphics and agencies
- UnicornGo – $US399 per month for one design request at a time. For 3 designs at a time and express design delivery, you’ll need their $US999 per month plan.
- manypixels – $US349 per month for designs, landing pages, wireframes, branding
- penji – $US349 to $US698 per month (for multiple design requests in the queue at a time each month)
- alltime design – $US349 per month paid monthly or $US249 pm if paid annually.
- draftss – $US259 per month for designers from India. Can also get one task for $US29 and get 6 tasks at a time for $US1299.
How can they offer this?
You’d think that offering “unlimited” design at a fixed price would be impossible but it’s not if you use the right conditions on the service.
Let’s look at the business model, based on the average of the above pricing, $373 per month:
- Client pays $373 per month for “unlimited” design
- Terms state that you can add as many design tasks as you like but that they are completed one at a time (with a turnaround time of 1-2 business days + time for revisions). Similar to how Netflix started.
- Assuming most design tasks average out at 1.5 hours (using templates as much as possible) and assuming an hourly rate for a freelancer is $8 per hour (using cheap labour options), the cost per day is a maximum of $12.
- Push this daily maximum out to a month and you have a maximum cost of $360, assuming work with no revisions delivered on every day of the week.
- The way profit margin is baked in is using the assumptions that people won’t have 30 tasks per month, revisions add an extra day and are quick to complete, templates can reduce the design time to under 30 minutes.
We haven’t heard of people testing out these services but they do seem to fill a need in the marketplace for low-cost design options.
An update! We’ve had clients use these services with good and bad results…so, should you use an unlimited monthly design service? Yes, if you’ve got smaller, non-urgent jobs that you need completed to a standard-quality level. No, if you’re looking to have urgent work completed, need cutting-edge designs or prefer the interaction of speaking to a designer face-to-face.
