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Strategy
06 Aug 2026
4 min
READ
BY
Prisma Studio
Hourly rates undersell the work. How to price the outcome instead of the time it takes. Here is how we approach it in practice, and what we look for before anything gets designed.
[ pricing your first brand project ]
Hourly rates undersell the work. How to price the outcome instead of the time it takes. It is one of the questions we get asked most, so here is the short version of how we think about it.
01 — Start with the problem
Every decision is easier once the real problem is written down in one sentence. Until then, opinions fill the gap and the work drifts toward whatever looks newest.
We keep that sentence visible through the whole project. When a direction stops serving it, we drop the direction, not the sentence.
“Good work is mostly the decisions you refuse to make twice.”
— PRISMA STUDIO
02 — Keep the system small
The fewer rules a system has, the more likely people are to follow them. In practice that means:
One clear principle per decision, written down
A short list of tokens instead of a long list of exceptions
Examples of what not to do, next to what to do
A single owner for every part of the system
03 — Check it against reality
Specimens and mockups are kind to every idea. Real content, real screens and real deadlines are not, so we test early with the messiest material we can find.
If it still holds up there, it will hold up everywhere else — and the work keeps looking considered long after launch.
[
Strategy, Pricing
]
