A brand style guide can cost a few hundred dollars. It can cost fifty thousand. The number on its own tells you almost nothing, because it depends on which of two different things you are actually buying. One is a short reference document: a logo file, a colour palette, a couple of type rules, built to keep a small team consistent. The other is a full identity system built from strategy and messaging down to the guide itself, with the document arriving as the last step in a much bigger project. Ask a studio for a quote before you know which one you need, and you'll get an answer that solves the wrong problem.
At the low end, a freelancer puts together logo variations, a colour palette and basic type rules for somewhere between five hundred and two thousand dollars. Fast, cheap, and good enough for a founder who is the only person touching the brand. A mid level agency charges two to ten thousand for a wider document: tone of voice, iconography, guidance on photography and layout, the kind of thing you hand to a new hire and expect them to get right. The jump in price buys judgement as much as pages. A freelancer tells you what the logo looks like on a black background. An agency tells you why the brand should never raise its voice, and what to do when a client asks it to anyway.
High end studios charge ten to fifty thousand or more for a style guide alone. At that point you're mostly paying for the research and testing behind every rule, not the rules themselves. Go further and commission a full identity, strategy, naming, messaging and visual system built together, and the number moves to forty thousand and up, sometimes well past a hundred. That is not the same purchase as a style guide. It's the project the style guide gets written for. Conflating the two is the fastest way to feel overcharged for something you never actually asked for.
Inside any of those bands, four things move the price. Scope: a one page cheat sheet costs a fraction of a full system with photography direction and template rules. Custom against templated: original type and illustration cost more than adapting something that already exists, for fairly obvious reasons. Who holds the pen: branding agencies in North America bill roughly a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars an hour, a senior specialist runs two to five hundred, and a freelancer working from a spare room charges neither rate. Revisions matter too. A flat fee usually caps the rounds included, and every round past that gets billed separately. That's where a fixed quote quietly turns into an open one.
The mistake we see most often is choosing the cheapest guide that technically counts as one. A five hundred dollar PDF nobody opens does not save money. It gets ignored the first time a new designer needs an answer fast, the brand drifts a little more each month, and eighteen months later somebody commissions a full rebrand to fix a problem a properly scoped guide would have prevented for a tenth of the cost. Buy for how many people will actually open the document. Not for the lowest number on the quote.
Before you ask a studio for a number, work out how many people touch the brand day to day, and what has to survive contact with a junior designer or a client in a hurry. Bring that to the first call instead of a budget. The quote you get back will match what you are actually buying.