How Much Does UI/UX Design Cost? What You're Actually Paying For

A £500 freelancer quote and a £50,000 agency quote for 'a design for my app' are not quoting the same thing. The gap is almost never about the visual output — it is about what surrounds the design work: research, system thinking, developer handoff quality, and how many rounds of iteration are built into the scope.

The freelancer delivers screens. The agency delivers a system: documented components, interaction states, responsive behaviour across breakpoints, developer-ready specs, and design tokens that the engineering team can implement without interpretation. If you are building a one-off landing page, the screens are enough. If you are building a product that will be extended for years, the system is what you need.

At the minimum: visual design — how it looks. At mid-range: UX thinking — how it works, how users move through it, where they drop off, and how the interface handles edge cases. At the high end: system design — a reusable component library, documented in Figma, with tokens that map to your codebase, so every future page your team builds stays consistent without a designer in the room.

The research layer (user interviews, usability testing, competitive audit) sits on top of all of these and is the most commonly cut scope item. Cutting it is sometimes rational on a small project with a clear user; it is rarely rational on a product that processes significant transaction volume or has users with varying levels of technical literacy.

A landing page or single marketing page: £1,500–£5,000. A business website (5–15 pages): £3,000–£12,000. A Shopify storefront UI: £5,000–£20,000. A web application with multiple user roles: £15,000–£45,000. A full design system with documented component library: £20,000–£60,000. Mobile app UI/UX (iOS and Android): £25,000–£80,000.

These ranges assume professional Figma delivery with developer-ready specs. Add 30–50% if user research and usability testing are in scope. Add 20–30% if brand identity work (logo, type, colour, illustration style) is being created as part of the engagement rather than applied from an existing brand guide.

A design system is a library of reusable UI components — buttons, form fields, cards, navigation, modals, data tables — defined once in Figma and mapped to code tokens, so that every new screen or feature is assembled from the same building blocks rather than designed from scratch.

You need one when: more than one designer will work on the product, the engineering team needs to build new screens without a designer present, the product will grow significantly over the next 12 months, or you have experienced the cost of design inconsistency already (screens that look different, components that behave differently, developer time spent interpreting inconsistent specs).

You do not need one when you are building a small, relatively static site that will not be extended significantly — a well-executed one-off design is faster and cheaper.

Ask to see their Figma files, not just their portfolio. The portfolio shows what they shipped; the Figma file shows how they work — whether components are properly structured, whether auto-layout is used consistently, whether states (hover, focus, error, empty, loading) are documented, and whether the file is usable by a developer who was not in the design review.

Ask about their developer handoff process. A design that lands in a developer's hands without properly named layers, missing states, or ambiguous spacing is a design that will be implemented inconsistently. Ask who does QA on the implementation — whether the designer reviews the built product against the specs before launch, or hands off the file and disappears.