Two catalog quotes can differ by a factor of five and still both be fair. One designer may be pricing a 16-page brochure with forty products and clean photos; another may be pricing 64 pages built from a messy spreadsheet with three hundred references. Before you compare totals, you need to know what each price actually covers.
The five things that set the price
1. Finished pages
Pages are the most visible driver. Count the final pages, including front and back covers, because every page needs design and checking. A spread is two pages. Category openers and lifestyle pages count too, even if they carry no products.
2. Number of products
Each product module needs a photo placed and cropped, a name, a reference, specifications and often a price. Forty products and three hundred products are very different jobs, even on the same number of pages. Variants shown in the same module (colours, sizes) usually count as one product.
3. The quality of your data
This is the hidden cost. If your products live in one clean spreadsheet, with one row per product and one column per field, most of the layout can be built systematically and checked quickly. If information is spread across emails, PDFs and old catalogs, someone has to assemble it first — and that time is either in the quote or it appears later as an extra.
4. Photography
Designers place and crop the photos you supply. Clipping products from their background, retouching, colour matching between shoots or organising a new photo session are separate services. Ask whether the quote assumes ready-to-use images.
5. Files and formats
A print catalog needs a PDF prepared to your printer's size, bleed and colour profile. A digital catalog needs a lighter PDF with clickable contents and links. If you want to update the catalog yourself next season, you need the editable InDesign files and a layout built with styles. Each of these should be listed in the quote.
What our catalog packages include
To make comparison easy, our prices are fixed by pages and products and every package includes the print PDF, the screen PDF and the editable files:
- Essential catalog — $590: up to 16 pages and 40 products.
- Complete catalog — $990: up to 32 pages and 120 products, with category openers and specification tables.
- Extended catalog — $1,690: up to 64 pages and 300 products, plus a reusable template and a separate price list.
See the full details on our product catalog design page.
Questions that make quotes comparable
- How many finished pages and products does the price include?
- Do you work from my spreadsheet, or do I need to prepare text per page?
- Are photos only placed, or also clipped and retouched?
- How many revision rounds are included, and what counts as a new change?
- Do I receive a print PDF, a screen PDF and the editable files?
- Can prices be updated without redesigning the catalog?
Where catalogs go over budget
Most overruns come from content that changes after layout: new products added halfway through, prices updated three times, or descriptions rewritten after the pages are built. The cheapest catalog is the one whose data is final before design starts. If your prices change often, keep them in a separate price list so the catalog itself can stay unchanged for the whole season.
Next step: read how to prepare your product data before you ask for a quote.