A fractional design team, with the build included
A fractional design team gives you senior designers by the hour instead of on payroll: $150/hr, 50-hour monthly minimum, about $7,500/mo, month-to-month. Ours differs from the design-subscription category in one structural way — the same pool of hours also covers web development, video and copywriting, so the design you approve on Tuesday can be a live page by Friday instead of a Figma file waiting for a developer you haven't hired.
What the design hours cover
Everything a marketing team asks a design department for, on one meter. Logos and full branding. Brand guides. Landing pages, slide decks for the sales team, ebooks, infographics, ad creative, event brands. Website design in Webflow, WordPress, or HubSpot. There is no per-deliverable menu and no “that’s a different tier” conversation — hours are hours, at $150 each.
The people doing it are senior. The design bench is led by our creative director alongside a senior designer with 12 years of experience, and you talk to them directly in your own Slack, Asana, Trello, or Notion. You will not brief a coordinator who briefs a queue.
Volume is the part buyers underestimate. For Camp Coalesce, one event brand, the team delivered 300+ on-brand assets across landing pages, social posts, and swag. That kind of throughput at senior quality is our operating model doing its job: AI handles production, and the named senior creatives spend their hours on judgment.
Design results you can check
Design quality claims are cheap, so we only make the checkable kind. Three from the published case studies:
SourceWhale
Conversion rate up 22% after our rebrand and website redesign, alongside $161K a year saved versus a comparable in-house team.
Fixify
A venture-funded IT-helpdesk startup whose brand we designed end to end. They raised a $25M Series A after launch.
Coalesce
Visual identity polished and key pages rebuilt under a 3+ year retainer. A $50M Series B followed the brand update.
What we won’t claim
That the funding rounds happened because of the rebrands. Nobody can honestly parse that attribution, and we’d rather you trust the numbers we can defend. Design was on the field for all three outcomes, and each case study is published in full under our work.
Fractional design team vs unlimited-design subscription
If you’re pricing us, you’re probably also pricing a subscription. Read the fine print on five lines before you decide.
| Option | Scope | “Unlimited” in practice | Terms | Price | Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unlimited-design subscription | Commonly design-only; web development typically unmet | Tends to mean 10–20 delivered requests a month once turnaround is counted | “Flexible” plans often still carry year-long commitments and strict tiers | ~$15K/mo typical floor for enterprise-class plans | Typically routed through a PM/CSM layer and a ticketing queue |
| Fractional design team (Brightbase) | Design plus development, video and copy on one pool of hours | Explicit hours; unused ones roll over, capped at 100% of the month | Month-to-month, 30-day cancellation | From ~$7,500/mo (50 hrs at $150) | Direct to the senior designer, in your tools, unlimited meetings |
The scope row is the one that bites. A design-only plan produces mockups; someone still has to build them, and that someone is a second vendor, a second contract, and a second place for quality to leak.
When a fractional design team is the wrong buy
Short section, honest answers. We are the wrong tool in four cases.
You need one product designer embedded in a sprint team, 40 hours a week.
The whole job is a single cheap logo.
Your budget is well under $7,500 a month.
Design demand is real but web demand is zero.
Steady design demand plus things that need building is our profile. It’s why the retainer includes the developer.
