How Much Does a Quality Infographic Design Cost?

Infographics are still a pretty good marketing technique, providing two things: first, your infographic is compellingly created, and second, that you are able to spread the graphic and link around to relevant sites.

In order to create a good graphic, you probably need to pay a graphic designer. Thankfully, they are all over the place, often starving for work, so you probably don’t have to wait. Unfortunately, depending on your requirements, it might cost you a good chunk of change.

Price – Adjusting Factors

There are actually a lot of different factors that go into the price of the infographic design you want. Let’s take a look at them.

First up, you have the research. Some infographic production companies are willing to take a concept and do the research themselves. Others want the raw data but will format it for you. Some don’t even do that, and prefer to take finished data in a rough presentation and just massage it into a good design. Obviously, the more work you want the company to do for you, the more expensive it’s going to be.

Then you have the presentation. I’m sure you’ve all seen the infographics that basically just look like a grid of bar graphs and pie charts, something you could throw together in Excel rather than needing graphic design to make. These tend to be pretty simple to make, so they aren’t as expensive. If you want something that involves more cartoon-style illustrations, more PhotoShop work, or some of the more innovative designs, it’s going to cost more. The reason is simple; it just takes longer to produce, and most designers work by the hour. Additionally, length of your graphic will have an impact here as well. If it’s something that would fit in a one page document, that’s cheap; if it’s something that stretches longer than the average blog post, that’s more expensive.

Next up you have to consider whether you’re doing it yourself or hiring (either a freelancer, or an agency). If you’re putting something together yourself, it’s generally free, but that’s not quite true. In reality, you have to consider the amount of money you get paid, and the time you spend doing the work, and what other work you could be doing if you weren’t doing the graphic. You can also do it yourself with some specialized tools. There are online drag-and-drop style graphic design programs you can use to create infographics, and they can cost all sorts of different price points.

Agencies tend to be moderately expensive, but have a more narrow band of pricing than freelancers. Freelancers run the gamut depending on who you find and where you find them. A cheap freelancer on Fiverr might cost you under $50 for all their extras, whereas a good designer from 99Designs could cost you $50 an hour with a guaranteed 8 hour minimum.

On top of all of that, you need to consider various extras. If you want a blog post written for your graphic, you’re going to have to pay for it, the designer won’t do it for free. Some designers won’t do it at all. Some agencies offer promotion packages as well as graphic design; you can pay for the exposure, but you have to make sure the promotion is actually valid. You never know if they’re just getting you a bunch of links from their own private blog network, which won’t really benefit you. Then you have the extreme design elements you could add, like interactive or animated infographics. Since these require a lot more work and specialized skills and tools, you’ll need to find specialized freelancers or agencies to do it, and that won’t come cheap.

Price – Examples

With all of the above in mind, let’s take a look at various sources of infographic design and what you can get for your money.

PiktoChart – PiktoChart is a design tool you can use to create an infographic from scratch. It requires that you have your design in mind and your information on hand, because no one is helping you put something together. They allow you to make as many graphics as you want, and their editor is pretty easy to use, though it does tend to lean on the side of the “grid-based graphs” design style. It’s harder to do something free-flowing with a drag-and-drop editor, after all.

It’s free to sign up for their tool, but you can’t really do much without paying for a package. Currently they have two packages. One is $15 per month and gives you access to their 600+ graphic templates. You can upload up to 100mb of your own images to use, but no more. You are also only able to download your projects in standard quality. The second package is $29 per month, so double the cost. You still get the templates, but the photo upload limit is boosted to 400mb. You can also download your graphics in print quality, as PDFs, or even as SlideShare decks. You can password protect them or make them private if you like. You also have to pay for the second tier to have whitelabel graphics; otherwise they watermark your projects.

Canva – We’ve probably mentioned Canva before on this site, because it’s an excellent tool to use for all sorts of graphic design. They have dozens of templates and a huge library of free images and design elements you can use. Plus, they have an even wider library of pay-to-use images you can license for use in your graphics. Canva’s pricing model is extremely flexible, meaning you can create graphics entirely free, or you can end up spending hundreds, depending on how many elements you want and how large your projects become. Like PiktoChart, it’s a tool you use yourself, it’s just significantly cheaper. Definitely my number one pick for a self-serve tool.

Only Infographics – This one is a design company, not a tool. They have worked with a variety of different industries, but seem to focus in business, finance, and medical areas.

They have some excellent illustrations in these graphics, and you can see them in the portfolio on the site. They promote their ability to get you a draft within a week, and they’ll do everything, up to and including research, scripting, and publishing. Pricing depends on the size and amount of content required.

• A4 or Letter sized graphics with up to 200 words of content are $400, $500 if you want them to do the content creation as well, and $600 if you want promotion after creation.
• Strip sized graphics with up to 500 words of content are $600 for the design, $800 for the content as well as design, and $900 if you want promotion as well.

The company is part of the Only network of media creators as well. They will make explainer videos, presentations, and landing pages as well if you want. If you want a total package with a landing page, infographic, and video, you can contact them and see if they’ll give you a special package deal.

Design Hill – This site is a hub for freelancers to compete in design contests. You submit a contest and you get submissions from designers, pick the one you want, and work with them to complete a finished design. There are some tricky steps along the way, primarily meant to avoid fraud or content theft, and to make sure you pay, but don’t worry too much about that. Just be honest and you’ll be fine. As for their packages, they have three tiers: standard, executive, and premium.

• Standard is $289. You can expect 20+ designers to submit around 40+ designs to choose from. You can also get promotion via newsletter and social media. You get the designs in vector and a variety of image formats to use on your own, and you have full rights to the content created for you.
• Executive is $559. For the price, you get access to the higher tier handpicked designers and can expect 30+ designers to submit 60+ designs for your choosing. You can also get blog promotion on top of the other features in standard.
• Premium is $829. Your contest is only available to the cream of the crop designers, of which 40+ are expected to respond. Your contest is highlighted in their database, and if you see a specific designer you want, you get one free “paid invite” to give then an additional bit of cash to submit a design.

Now, there’s something to be said about contests, and it’s not really favorable. While a contest may sound like a good idea from a brand standpoint, from the freelancer’s point of view it’s kind of exploitative. Freelancers do a lot of work for contest submissions and aren’t compensated unless they’re chosen. Now, I’m not assuming that my comment is going to make contests go away, but I want you to know that the very best freelancers out there aren’t going to be participating in contests, because they know better. They know how much their skills are worth.

DKNewMedia – This is a high tier design company that works with a variety of different types of content. They make websites, landing pages, infographics, explainer videos, and a whole lot more. They don’t have a pricing page, but according to a blog post on Martech.zone, they charge a project rate of $5,000 for an infographic.

If you want to have a new graphic produced every quarter, the price per graphic drops to $4,000. If you want monthly graphics, you’ll “only” be paying $3,000 per graphic with the contract. They also have a (slightly broken code) box in this blog post saying that if you mention it they’ll discount your first graphic by a full $1,000. Now, I don’t know if that offer is still in effect, I’m not related to either company, so you’ll have to explore yourself. Is their design worth the price? You’ll have to look at their portfolio and see for yourself.

Fiverr – The link here goes to the first gig as a result of the query “infographic” on Fiverr. I’m not an affiliate or associated with the creator in any way, so don’t consider this promotion for them; just an example.

Fiverr bills themselves as “get what you want for $5” but it’s not really accurate. Fiverr gigs start at $5, but virtually every worthwhile gig these days has a handful of options or extras that cost more.

This infographic creator, for example, will make you a graphic in two days, with up to seven data points, and two total revisions, for $5. That’s very little data, though, and not many revisions if you don’t like the look of some elements of the graphic. For $10, they will give you one with up to 15 data points and 5 revisions, and for $20 they will give you up to 25 data points and unlimited revisions, as well as the ability to use the graphic commercially.

Granted, this price is still extremely cheap for an infographic. The reason is because the designer – and many other designers on Fiverr – is from Indonesia. The cost of living in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia is so low that designers can leverage their skills on a site like Fiverr and make a living wage, while undercutting everyone working in a country like America.

Visual.ly – Another one of the high end design companies, I would wager you’ve seen their work before and not realized it. Their infographics start at $3,000, which hooks you up with a network of designers, journalists, and directors to help produce content for you. You’re putting together a team to work with from their ranks. It’s expensive and it’s very much worth it to have something extremely high quality at the end of it.

So, there you have a bunch of examples. How much does an infographic cost? It can be free for the DIYer, it can be $5 from Fiverr, or it can be $5,000 from an agency. It all depends on what you want and who you want doing it.