Say it plainly in the first review: I don't like this. Nothing breaks. Any studio that has done this a few times expects to hear some version of that sentence in at least one meeting, because the first concepts are meant to get argued with, not signed off on sight. What clients usually mean by "I don't like it" is narrower than it sounds. Wrong color. Too playful for the audience. A headline that undersells the product. Rarely does it mean the whole idea was wrong, and that gap is the entire point of a revision round. Disliking round one costs you nothing extra, as long as you say so inside the process the contract already paid for.
Most studios build two to three revision rounds into the project fee before anyone signs, and Kott is one of them. A round isn't a slow drip of individual notes over three weeks. It's one piece of consolidated feedback, written down, covering everything you want changed at once. Scattered feedback, a message here, a call there, one more thing the following Tuesday, is how projects quietly triple in length without anyone deciding that on purpose. Ask what counts as a round before the kickoff call. Not after you've already burned two of them arguing about a font.
Disliking the execution isn't the same as wanting a different idea, and it helps to know which one you're actually feeling before you open your mouth. Layout's right but the tone is off, or the concept works but the color story feels wrong for your industry: that's a revision, fixable inside the rounds you already have. Looking at the whole thing and thinking this solves a problem we don't have is different. That's a new direction, and it resets the clock. New strategy, not a tweak, and a studio worth hiring will say so plainly instead of quietly eating the cost.
What happens next in the room matters more than the dislike itself. A studio that knows its craft asks why before it touches anything: what specifically is wrong, for whom, against what. Then one of two things happens. Either it explains the reasoning behind the original choice, because sometimes the wrong color was chosen on purpose and the explanation resolves it, or it builds a single compromise revision that keeps what was working and fixes what wasn't. What a good studio shouldn't do is hand you five directions and ask you to pick. That turns you into the art director, and the result is usually a design stitched together from whichever piece of each option you liked best. It rarely holds up.
Going past the rounds you agreed to isn't a violation. It's a scope conversation, and it should carry a number before it happens, not after. Extra rounds are typically priced as a flat fee per round or a percentage of the project cost, and a studio that has this figured out tells you the number at signing, not when you're three rounds deep and already invested. Nobody mentioned a limit before the project started? Ask now, before you use round four assuming it was free.
Then there's the edge case: walking away entirely instead of revising. You no longer want this studio, or this project, full stop. That's where a kill fee applies, and it's worth understanding before you actually need it. A kill fee is a partial payment for the work and thinking already spent, not a penalty for changing your mind. It's commonly tiered to how far the project got: a smaller percentage if you cancel before anything started, more once concepts have been presented, because presenting concepts already consumed real strategic work that can't be resold to the next client as is. None of this means the project failed. It's what a properly written contract is for.
Before you sign with any studio, ask three questions. How many revision rounds are included. What counts as one round. What happens, in writing, not in conversation, once you go past it. A studio that answers all three without flinching has done this enough times to know exactly where the line sits.