Published pricing guides put one email template at roughly $100 to $2,000, with $500 to $1,000 the figure you'll see most. That's the email template design cost for one layout, built once. The number that hurts is a different one: what you pay every week to rebuild it. A template stops paying for itself the day someone has to redesign it for each send.
Three things move the price. Complexity is the first. The number of versions is the second, since a promo, a newsletter and a receipt are three templates, not one. The third is who builds it. Pre-made templates run about $30 to $50, and the ones built into your email platform are cheaper still, but you get what you can bend. For a one-off announcement, fine. For a brand that sends every week, usually not.
A custom template is mostly hours. One pricing guide says designing a single template from scratch takes at least 12 hours, plus another 2.5 to 3 hours to code it so it holds up in an inbox. The same guide quotes freelancers at $25 to $150 an hour and email agencies at $99 to $249. Multiply it out and you land close to the $500 to $2,000 the guides quote per template. Agency project work, which usually means a set of templates plus testing, is quoted at $1,000 to $10,000.
Now the sum that decides it. Neither guide gives reuse or payback figures, so treat this as arithmetic on their ranges, not a statistic. Say a template costs $1,000 and you send weekly. That's 52 sends a year, so the template costs under $20 per send in year one, and less each year after. Now say each send needs even two hours of a freelancer's time to lay out from nothing. At the quoted $25 to $150 an hour, that's $50 to $300 per send, every send, indefinitely. The template wins by a distance, as long as it really is a template.
That condition is where most of them fail. A template stops paying when it was built too rigid and every new send needs a designer to bend it. It stops paying when a rebrand lands and nobody budgeted to rebuild it. It stops paying when versions pile up with no owner and the team starts copying last month's email and editing it. And it stops paying when the coding hours were skipped, so it looks right in the preview and breaks in the inboxes your customers actually use. If your template needs a designer every week, it was never a template.
This is where a studio earns the fee. What's worth buying is a system: a small set of modules built and tested once, then handed over so your team can assemble each send without opening a design tool. You're paying for the 12 hours and the testing so that nobody pays for them again. Buying a single pretty email is the expensive way to get a cheap result.
Cheap has its place. If you send two emails a year, a $30 to $50 pre-made template is the right call, and a custom build would never earn its cost.
Your next step takes ten minutes. Count the emails you sent in the last year. Count how many needed new layout work from a designer or freelancer. Multiply that second number by what you actually paid each time, then set the total beside $500 to $2,000. If your yearly layout bill is the bigger number, you're already paying for a custom template. You just don't own one. That's the brief to give a studio.