PRODUCT DESIGN · 2–4 WEEKS
Interfaces for products that do something new
Product design covers the interface and flows of an application: screens, states, a design system and the interaction rules behind them. Elevate Studio's runs two to four weeks and starts at $3,000. Price moves with surface count, whether a design system exists, and how many user roles the product serves.
Booking from September 2026. One or two engagements at a time. You get a start date on the first call, not a maybe.
THE GAP
The product is good. The interface makes it look like a weekend project.
The model works. The pipeline is real. The demo lands. Then someone opens the actual app and finds a chat box, a settings page nobody planned, four shades of the same grey, and a loading state that gives no clue whether it will take two seconds or forty. The product is ahead of the interface, and buyers cannot tell the difference between the two.
THE AI-SPECIFIC PART
Products built on models have interface problems that ordinary software does not. Output is probabilistic, so the interface has to show how confident it is. Output is wrong sometimes, so correction has to be a designed path rather than an apology. Output is slow sometimes, so waiting has to be readable. And output comes from somewhere, so provenance has to be visible. Skip these and the product feels unreliable even when it is not.
WHAT SHIPS
Screens, the states behind them, and the rules that keep the next twenty consistent.
The system matters more than the screens. Screens solve this month; a system means the twentieth screen your team adds without us still looks like it belongs.
HOW IT RUNS
Two to four weeks, depending on how much product there is.
A tight scope lands in two weeks. A multi-role product with a dashboard and an admin side takes four. We tell you which before you commit, not halfway through.
WHAT IT COSTS
A floor you can plan against, then the multipliers.
Most product design engagements land between $3,000 and $5,000. Larger builds with several roles and a management portal run higher, and we say so before starting rather than after.
WHERE WE ARE THE WRONG SHAPE
If you need a designer in Slack every day shipping small changes, hire one or use a subscription studio. If you have not shipped anything yet and are still deciding what the product is, design will not settle that argument. And if you want a rebuild of a working product because it feels dated, get an audit first — dated and broken are different problems with different budgets.
WHO BUYS THIS
Technical teams whose product is further along than its interface.
AI startups between pre-seed and Series A with two to fifteen people, engineers who can build anything and no designer to tell them what. Growing SaaS companies whose product grew feature by feature until nothing matched. Both have the same tell: the demo goes well and the trial does not convert.
QUESTIONS
How much does product design cost for a startup?
Ours starts at $3,000 and typically lands between $3,000 and $5,000 for a focused scope — a core flow, its states, and the system behind it. What moves it: the number of surfaces, whether there are multiple user roles, and whether you already have a component library to extend.
Do you design in Figma and hand off, or do you build?
We design in Figma and hand off to your engineers with the states, tokens and edge cases documented. We build the marketing site, not the application. Most teams building an AI product already have engineers and need design, not another developer.
Why do AI products need different design from other SaaS?
Because the output is probabilistic. A traditional interface shows a result; an AI interface has to show confidence, let the user correct it, explain where the answer came from, and behave sensibly when the model is slow or wrong. Most AI tools skip all four and ship a chat box.
We already have a product. Do we need a redesign or an audit?
If specific things are not working and you want to know which, start with a UX audit — it is cheaper and it tells you where the money should go. If you already know what is broken, or you are building something new, start here.
Can you work alongside our engineers?
That is the normal arrangement. You get direct access to the designer doing the work, files your team can build from, and a system that survives the next twenty screens they add without us.
We would rather you got a straight answer than a sales page. These open with the question already written.