What studio websites don’t tell you

How this was done

Forty-seven addresses opened by hand across Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and Latin America. 33 studios had enough legible information to record. A second pass covered 36 studios in the UK and US specifically.

Not scraped, and not taken from directories. Somebody opened each site and wrote down three things: how the studio names what it does, what it publishes about price, timelines and process, and where it is listed elsewhere.

That method has a limit worth stating. It captures what a studio chooses to show a stranger, which is exactly what a buyer sees, and nothing about how good the work is.

The silence, in four numbers

Across the 33 studios with legible information:

• 0 of 33 publish prices.
• 0 of 33 publish contractual terms.
• 1 of 33 publishes delivery timelines.
• 1 of 33 has a frequently asked questions section.
• 19 of 33 have a services page at all.

Those two ones are not noise. They are the map. Nobody occupies the ground where timelines and plain answers live, which happens to be exactly what somebody wants before they write to a stranger about spending five figures.

In the UK and US sample of 36, the picture holds: three publish prices or timelines. The rest say some version of "let's talk".

The silence is pointless, and here is why

This is the part that changed how we think about it.

Open the directory listings where buyers compare studios, and the numbers are already there. For each agency, published without asking permission: minimum project budget, in bands. Hourly rate, in bands. Team size. Verified review average. Sortable by price.

So a buyer can already see the figure. In the London listings you can put a studio with a $25,000 minimum and one with a $1,000 minimum on the same screen and order them by cost.

Which means the argument for not publishing collapses. You are not choosing whether the buyer sees your number. You are choosing whether they see it with your explanation next to it, or in a comparison table between two competitors with no context at all. Silence does not protect the margin. It gives away the framing.

Almost nobody says who they are for

Of the 36 UK and US studios, one names its buyer. One. The other thirty-five describe themselves.

It is an odd thing to notice and then hard to stop noticing. Page after page of what the studio believes, how it works, what it values, and no sentence anywhere identifying the person who should be reading.

Two studios in the sample do something related and do it well: they sell situations rather than disciplines. Not "branding, digital, strategy" but the state a company is in when it needs them. Those two are the most memorable of the thirty-six by a distance, and we suspect that is not a coincidence.

How many services a studio names, by market

This one surprised us and it is quietly diagnostic.

No English-speaking studio in the sample names more than seven services. The median in the UK and US is four, and they are wide areas: Brand, Product, Digital, Strategy.

In Spain and Latin America the median rises to six, and the tail is where it gets interesting: one studio lists forty. Others list twenty-two and nine.

A list of forty deliverables is not a services page, it is an inventory. It answers "what can you do" when the buyer is asking "what would you do about this". The four-item version is a harder document to write, because it requires deciding what you are for.

The market splits in two, with a gap in the middle

Reading the 36 together, they fall into two groups that barely overlap.

At one end, studios doing immersive and interactive work, priced from roughly $50,000 upward, collecting design awards, working with global brands that have marketing departments.

At the other, template-based delivery shops publishing short turnarounds as the selling point, starting around £499.

Between the two there is very little. Which is strange, because that is where a great many real companies sit: an established business with actual operations, no budget for an $80,000 immersive piece, and for whom a £2,000 template is an insult to what they have built.

One more finding on price, and it is the most commercially loaded thing in this whole survey. The same work is worth roughly three to five times more when it is presented as an immersive experience than when it is presented as brand and web. Same craft. Different shelf.

Each niche collects a different currency

Where studios seek proof splits cleanly, and it is not interchangeable.

The brand and digital studios accumulate verified client reviews in directories. The immersive and interactive studios accumulate design awards — the well-known galleries, and the festival prizes.

Choosing a niche is therefore also choosing which of those two you invest a year in, and the investment does not transfer. A cabinet of design awards does very little in a directory ranked by review count, and a wall of five-star reviews does nothing in a gallery judged on craft.

How to read a studio site, as a buyer

The practical use of all this. When you open the next one:

• Look for a timeline. One in thirty-three publishes one. If a studio tells you how long things take before you ask, that is information about how they run projects, not just about the calendar.
• Look for who they say it is for. One in thirty-six manages it. A site that never describes its client is a site that has not decided.
• Count the services. Four wide ones suggests a studio that has chosen. Forty narrow ones suggests an inventory.
• Check the directory listing before the site. The minimum budget and hourly rate are published there whether the studio likes it or not, and it takes thirty seconds.
• See whether they say no to anything. Almost none do. The ones that do are telling you where the edges of their work actually are, which is the most useful sentence on any studio website.

What we do with our own findings

It would be dishonest to publish this without saying where we land, since the survey covers us too.

We publish timelines, because one in thirty-three is a gap rather than a norm. We answer questions plainly on the services page, for the same reason. We name our buyer, because thirty-five out of thirty-six do not.

We do not publish a rate, and having written the section above about the silence being pointless, that deserves an explanation rather than a pass. Our reason is not protection: it is that our range would have to be wide enough to be true, and a range that wide tells a buyer nothing they can use. What we do instead is explain what moves the number, and give a fixed figure with the scope in writing once we know the project.

Whether that distinction survives contact with a buyer who just wants a number is a fair challenge, and we would rather state the position than hide it inside a paragraph about craft.