How much does design actually cost?

Drag the slider to set how many design deliverables you ship per month. The calculator instantly shows monthly cost across four options: a Pushup Design subscription (auto-matched to Growth, Scale, or Elite based on volume), a freelancer at €80/hour, a traditional agency at €140/hour, and an in-house senior designer loaded at €7,500/month. Each option assumes ~30 senior-designer hours per deliverable — the European market average for a landing page, deck refresh, or 10-screen flow.

Senior freelance designers in Europe typically charge €70–€110/hour. Mid-tier agencies bill €120–€180/hour, with top-tier agencies at €200+/hour. A loaded in-house senior designer (€90,000/year salary + 30% overhead for taxes, equity, tools, and PTO) costs about €60/hour, but only delivers fixed capacity whether work is full or thin.

Agencies bill per project with discovery, kickoff, account management, and revision rounds folded into the rate — typical multipliers push effective cost to €120–€180/hour. A design subscription removes that overhead: one flat monthly fee, one ticket queue, one senior designer on rotation. You pay for designer time, not the agency layer around it.

Hire in-house when design work is steady at 6+ deliverables per month for 18+ months, when you need real-time collaboration with engineering, or when IP/security requirements rule out external partners. Below that threshold, a subscription wins on flexibility — pause when work slows, scale up tiers when you need more parallel work, with no severance or hiring overhead.

A “deliverable” is one scoped piece of work that a senior designer ships in roughly 30 hours: a landing page, a pitch deck refresh, a 10-screen mobile flow, a logo system, or a Webflow build. Larger projects (a full rebrand, a 50-screen product) are typically broken into 2–4 deliverables. Match the slider to the number of pieces of work you’d want shipped each month, not the hours behind them.