What deep tech branding and websites cost
Why there is no price list, what you are actually buying, which decisions move the number most, and what makes a project cost more than it needed to.
- Fixed scope, fixed timeline, one price, quoted after a 30-minute call. Never a day rate and never an open-ended retainer.
- The number is moved by how much of the stack you need, not by how complicated your technology is.
- Three scopes cover most engagements: narrative only, brand and website, or brand through launch including film and collateral.
- The most expensive thing in any project is a position that gets changed after design has been applied to it.
Nobody publishes prices in this category, which is annoying if you are the one trying to budget. Here is the part that is actually useful: what you are buying, and which of your decisions move the number.
Why is there no price list?
Because the same words describe engagements that are genuinely different sizes.
A narrative and messaging project for a company with a settled position is not the same work as brand, naming, custom 3D, a scroll-driven site and a launch film sequenced against a tender. Both are honestly called "branding". A price list would either quote the small one and surprise you, or quote the large one and scare off the people who need the small one.
What we do instead is fix it early. Scope and timeline are agreed after a 30-minute audit call, before work starts. One price, not a day rate, not a retainer that runs until someone stops it.
What are you actually buying?
Time from people who can read your spec, arranged into one of three shapes.
Narrative only. Positioning, messaging architecture, the argument. For companies whose identity is fine and whose explanation is not.
Brand and website. The common one. Positioning, narrative, identity, naming where it is needed, then the site that carries it.
Brand through launch. The above plus the surfaces the website hands off to: film, investor deck, tender brochure, booth. Sequenced against a real date, usually a funding announcement, a tender or a trade show.
Most engagements are the middle one. The third is chosen when there is a date on the calendar that everything has to hit together.
What moves the number most?
How much of the stack you need. Not how hard your technology is.
This surprises people. A quantum computing company and a battery diagnostics company with the same scope cost about the same, because the work of understanding the technology is roughly constant and it is not the expensive part. What is expensive is surface area: how many things have to be designed, built and made consistent.
In rough order of impact: the number of deliverables, whether the site needs custom 3D, whether there is film, and whether naming is in scope. Naming is the one people underestimate. Company, product family and interface naming is a research project with legal screening attached, not an afternoon.
Does custom 3D change the price a lot?
It can, and the driver is movement rather than fidelity.
A static exploded view of a device is not expensive. A full assembly cell with articulated machines, a workpiece changing state and readable overlays is, because every additional moving element multiplies the animation and lighting work.
The question worth asking before commissioning any of it is whether depth is carrying the explanation. If the argument is spatial, 3D earns its cost. If it is a diagram of a system, 2D motion is clearer and cheaper, and choosing 3D anyway is the most common way to spend money without buying clarity.
Is a Webflow build cheaper than a static one?
Not meaningfully, and choosing on price is choosing on the wrong axis.
The build is a fraction of a project that is mostly strategy, design and 3D. What Webflow buys is a team that can edit without us. What a static build buys is performance headroom and control for things a visual builder cannot do. Pick the one that matches how you will run the site for the next two years, not the one that saves a little in week nine.
What does fixed scope, fixed timeline, one price protect you from?
The thing that goes wrong with day rates.
On a day rate, every hour of confusion is billable, which quietly aligns the studio's interest against yours. Fixed price puts the risk of a slow week on us. It also forces a real conversation about scope before anything starts, which is where that conversation belongs.
The trade is that scope changes are visible. Adding a deliverable in week seven is a change, not an absorption, and it gets priced. That feels rigid compared with a retainer. It is also why projects finish.
What makes a project cost more than it needed to?
A position that changes after design has been applied to it.
Changing the category you are claiming in week 3 costs a conversation. The same change in week 9, with identity applied, 3D modelled and a build underway, costs the identity, the 3D and the build. It is the single most expensive thing available in this process, and it is almost always caused by not involving a decision-maker early enough to disagree while disagreement was cheap.
Second is scope discovered late: the tender brochure nobody mentioned, the booth in six weeks, the investor deck that turns out to be the actual priority. None of those are hard. All of them are cheaper quoted at the start.
Is there documented return on this?
Some, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not prove.
Three outcomes are published on this site. PolyEnergetics raised and is on a growth path. Cloudphysician has said it closed its first US client after the first showing of the film. Turno's qualified leads went up and it is booked for months, with buyers waiting.
What those are is evidence that the work sat alongside a commercial result. What they are not is an attribution model. We did not close the client and we did not raise the round; the companies did, with technology we had nothing to do with. Any agency offering you a multiple on brand spend in deep tech is selling a number it cannot support, in a category where deal counts are small enough that attribution is close to impossible.
The defensible version is narrower and more useful. Design removes friction between how good the engineering is and how fast someone qualified understands it. Where that friction was costing meetings, removing it shows up commercially. Where it was not, it does not.
How do you know whether it is worth it?
Compare it to the cost of not being understood.
That sounds like an agency line, so here is the concrete version. If a qualified buyer reads your page and cannot tell what you do or why it is hard, you do not lose a marketing metric. You lose the meeting, and you usually never learn it happened. For a company selling to a few dozen buyers worldwide, that is a large number relative to any design budget.
The honest test is whether the gap between how good your engineering is and how quickly someone understands it is costing you deals. If it is not, you do not need this yet.
Written by Mejo Kuriachan. More in the blog, the glossary and the FAQ.