Search this question and you will find every answer except a useful one. So here is the honest version, including the part most firms leave out.
Brand audits run from free to well into five figures. That range sounds useless, but it is the truth, and the spread comes down to four things: what is being audited, how deep the research goes, who is doing the work, and what you are holding when it is over.
Scope is the big one. A visual-only audit looks at your logo, colors, and materials and checks whether they hold together. A full audit looks at positioning, message, voice, and how consistently all of it shows up everywhere a customer meets you. The first is a design review. The second is a business diagnosis. They should not cost the same, and they do not.
Depth of research moves the price more than anything else. An auditor who reviews your website and social profiles in an afternoon charges accordingly. One who talks to your customers, studies your competitors, and maps the gap between how you see the business and how the market sees it is doing weeks of work, and the findings are worth more because they are built on evidence instead of impressions.
Who does the work matters too. A freelancer might charge a few hundred dollars. A specialist consultancy usually lands somewhere in the four figures. A large agency can quote five figures before the first call ends. None of those numbers tells you much on its own, because the deliverable matters more than the letterhead.
Which brings up the part to actually pay attention to. The only deliverable worth paying for is a short, prioritized list of what to fix first and why it will make a difference. A hundred-item scorecard is not insight. It is homework you will never finish.
A few warning signs, whatever the price. An audit that only discusses visuals is a critique, not an audit. An audit that ends with a pitch to rebuild everything was a sales document all along. And an audit that cannot name the one thing holding the brand back did not go deep enough to find it.
We wrote about what the real thing involves in what a brand audit actually looks like. The short version: consistency, clarity, and the gap between your view of the business and the market's view. Price does not guarantee any of that. Rigor does.
Now the part most firms leave out. Our initial audit is free, on every engagement, and not as a loss leader. We cannot scope honest work without a diagnosis, so the diagnosis comes first, and charging for something we need anyway never sat right with us. If the audit shows we are not the right fit, we say that too, and you have lost nothing but a conversation.
If you want a read before talking to anyone, the free Brand Assessment scores your clarity, messaging, consistency, trust signals, and differentiation in a few minutes. And when you are ready for the full version, start a project and the audit is where we begin.