Blog, Pitch decks, 7 min read
How much does a pitch deck design cost, and what changes the price
Real ranges, what makes a quote go up, and how to brief a designer so the number does not move later.
Anyone quoting a deck without asking questions is guessing. The same "15 slide investor deck" can be a two day job or a three week one, and the difference is almost never the slide count.
What you are actually paying for
Three separate things get bundled into one number, and they cost different amounts.
- Design. Making the slides look like a company worth money. This scales with slide count.
- Structure. Deciding what goes on each slide and in what order. This scales with how unclear the story is when it arrives.
- Content. Writing the words and building the charts from raw data. This scales with how much raw material there is.
A founder who sends a finished narrative and clean numbers is buying design. A founder who sends a Google Doc of notes and a spreadsheet is buying all three, and it is a different job.
Rough ranges
Across the market you will see, per deck, roughly: a few hundred dollars for template work and slide cleanup, one to three thousand for a properly designed investor deck from a small studio, and five figures from a branding agency that treats the deck as a brand project. Freelancers on marketplaces sit at the low end, sometimes for good work, often for a template with your logo on it.
We quote per project after a short call rather than publishing a rate card, because the same slide count spans that whole range depending on the three things above. You get a number and a date, in writing, before anything starts.
What pushes a quote up
- No brand. If there is no palette, no typeface and no logo file, some of that has to be decided before a slide can be designed.
- Numbers that are not final. Redrawing charts three times because the model moved is the most common way a deck gets expensive.
- Custom illustration or 3D. Fast to ask for, slow to make.
- A hard deadline inside 48 hours. Rush work costs more everywhere and this is no exception.
- Multiple decision makers. Two founders who disagree about the story will pay for that disagreement in revision rounds.
What brings it down
- A finished script, even a rough one, written as headlines.
- Final numbers in one spreadsheet, with the chart you want marked.
- Existing brand files, or permission to set the visual direction ourselves.
- Naming one person who approves.
Ask what a revision round means
This is where quotes hide. Two rounds of revisions can mean two rounds of small edits, or it can mean two rounds of anything including a rewrite. Get it written down: how many rounds, what counts as a round, and what happens after they run out. A studio that will not put that in writing is planning to argue about it later.
Own the file at the end
Make sure the quote includes the editable source file, not just a PDF. You will need to change a number the week after the deck is finished, and paying someone to move one figure is a bad arrangement for everybody. We hand over every working file at the end of a project as a matter of course.