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UK-based design subscription services for clients of all sizes.
Get in touch for a chat about your requirements
If you need on-tap graphic design services with a fast turnaround and a sensible price ticket, Toast’s design subscription service is just the thing you are looking for!
What is a design subscription?
Basically, it’s a service where you pay a monthly fee, and you get all your design work completed with the minimum of hassle and fuss.
It can also be considered a design retainer and works similarly, but is intended to be more flexible and used for smaller design projects that you have on a daily or weekly basis.
What are the advantages of a design subscription?
Most design agencies and freelancers charge by the hour for design work.
Our design subscription service is billed by the minute, so you only pay for the time you use.
- If a job takes 12 minutes, you only pay for 12 minutes
- We typically turn around smaller projects in 1-3 days
- Use your subscription for anything – from Artwork to Web work
- Your time never expires so you don’t pay for the time you haven’t used
- You don’t have to deal with loads of separate invoices for small jobs
- We always let you know roughly how long a design task will take before we do it
- Everything is tracked and reported monthly – to the minute
What can you use your time for?
Any service that our in-house team of creatives can deliver!
Most design subscriptions only allow for small jobs, but with Toast, you can use it for anything.
Unlike other subscription services, your projects are not farmed out to freelancers – we do everything in house, so we can offer a wide range of services delivered by a team that knows and understands your brand.
Get started today- Artwork tweaks
- Brochure covers and layouts
- Business cards
- Conceptual work
- Copywriting
- Design tasks
- Email marketing
- Ephemera
- Fixing website problems
- Graphic design
- Help with strategy
- HubSpot
- Icon design
- Infographic design
- Landing page design
- Leaflets
- Logos
- Movies & animation
- Newsletter design
- Optimisation (technical website SEO)
- Poster design
- Pop-up banner design
- PowerPoint design and deck design
- Quarterly design reviews
- Research (keywords, markets etc.)
- Search engine optimisation
- Stationery design
- Social media graphics
- Technical diagrams
- UX design
- Vehicle wraps
- Website work
- WordPress websites
- Word Templates
- Zapier automation
- Z-cards
Why use Toast?
We’re an experienced agency.
For over 25 years, Toast has worked with a diverse range of clients, designing everything from business cards to websites.
This is a UK-based design subscription service. Please note we only work with clients based in the UK.
We do everything in-house, every project placed with Toast will be worked on by our fully employed design team.
- No freelancers, so you work with the same people all the time
- We get to know your brand, design framework and requirements
- Experienced, qualified designers
- Highly organised and used to working to tight deadlines and large-volume work
- 15 staff, so there is always someone on-hand to help out
- Established business – trading for over 25 years
What makes our design subscription different?
Only pay for what you use.
Unlimited design services are run like Gym memberships; these companies hope you will not use them.
This means that even on a cheap service, you can pay £1000s for a design service that you don’t even use.
Here when you need us, no charge when you don’t.
When you have design time with Toast, it never expires and you only pay for the minutes you use.
If you don’t use your time in one month, it’s still there next month – no need to pay twice.
We’re a design team, not a virtual network.
You can phone us and speak directly to the team. You can come to visit our studio, you’ll get to know your team.
We’re like an in-house design team that works with you to get the work done on time, every time.
Get started
What do we charge?
We believe that quality design services should be accessible to clients of all sizes, so our plans start small and scale to meet your needs.
If you are a sole trader or someone who manages a large marketing or PR team, we’ve got you covered.
£1 ex VAT per minute. It’s that simple.
Pay as you go.
If you only need help with design occasionally, this is for you. Just buy some time and use it as required. No contract, easy to use and straightforward.
- Standard service*
- Time never expires
- Top up whenever you need it
- Pay via card, PayPal or invoice
- Top-ups are a minimum of 120 minutes
- Cancel any time**
Start with £120 ex VAT for 120 minutes.
Start with ad-hocMonthly Subscription.
If you already know roughly how much design time you use every month, we can set up a recurring monthly invoice to cover you every month.
- Priority service*
- Time never expires, it rolls over month to month
- Fully itemised reports on time use
- One recurring invoice per month
- Pay via Direct Debit or Recurring Card payment
- Increase, decrease or top up your time whenever you like
- Cancel any time**
- Optional SLA***
Starts from £120 ex VAT per month for 120 minutes each month.
Start with monthly* Priority requests are actioned before standard requests.
** There is no cancellation period, but no refunds are given on unused time.
*** For larger businesses with higher spend and more requirements, a service level agreement can be put in place, subject to agreement.
How long do design tasks take?
What can I use my time for?
Any services we offer in-house at Toast, from Artwork to Websites.
Does my time expire?
No. Once you have bought design time from us, you can keep it indefinitely until it’s all used.
How long do design tasks take?
The more complex or in-depth the request, the longer it will take to complete and the more time it will require. A simple social media graphic might take 15 minutes, and a DL leaflet might take 3 hours.
It’s all in the briefing – the more we know about your requirements, the quicker we can turn the design around.
Note that we always give you an estimate of how long things will take before we start the task.
Is there a Service Level Agreement?
No. We can’t guarantee turnaround as we don’t know how long a task will take until we see the brief.
Can time be used against a larger project like a website or an annual report?
It can be, but for larger projects, we generally quote a fixed price against a fixed spec. If you are a design subscription client, you’ll get the quote at our £1 per minute rate.
Can I cancel my subscription?
Yes, whenever you like, but we don’t give refunds for unused time.
Do I have an account manager?
No, you deal directly with the design team. We use Zendesk and Basecamp to manage projects and Harvest to record time.
Everything is recorded, and we send breakdowns of all requests and time used.
Can my whole team use this?
Yes, anyone in your company can submit requests and have design tasks completed.
I need something today, can you do this?
We can certainly do what we can with this. As we have 15 creatives in the studio, we usually have the capacity for urgent design subscription requests. Note that this should be the exception rather than the norm. If you do have a lot of ‘I need this now’ requests, we’ll talk to you about how this can best be managed.
What happens if Toast uses more of my time than I am happy with?
If you don’t have corporate identity guidelines or a design system in place then every design task can feel like reinventing the wheel. This can take time.
If you are prone to changing your mind often, this also takes time.
We estimate the time require to complete a design before we do the work, if you make tweaks and small changes during the project, these only take minutes to complete.
If you change the entire direction of the creative post-brief then it’s going to take more time to complete the task.
Upfront discussion, a clear brief and a crystal clear understanding of your positioning, corporate identity and creative preferences will reduce the time used on each design task and mitigate over-use of time.
It’s all about communication, and we’re very good at that.
What happens if I don’t like the design work?
As per the above question, a good brief mitigates this event arising in the first place, but you are welcome to make changes and tweaks to whatever we send you.
Designers don’t always hit the nail on the head the first time, so if this happens we’ll always have a frank discussion with you before any more time is used.
Does unlimited design work?
No, it doesn’t. It either costs you a fortune or compromises quality.
This is not an unlimited design subscription.
Our design subscription is charged at £1 ex VAT per minute, but when you use up all your time, you simply top up with more at £1 per minute.
What is unlimited is the amount of work you can put our way. This is not true of other unlimited design subscriptions – they are based on hoping you will not do that.
Unlimited design services are quite simply a myth – these services are simply gambling that you won’t take them up on the offer and therefore they are more expensive in the long run.
We work by aligning ourselves with your brand, your deadlines and your marketing team to understand your requirements, streamlining projects and delivering killer creativity on time and on brief.
You can call us, we can do zoom or you can use email. Simple, quick and effective.
Get started todayHow do we manage this?
Whilst a lot of services make you use yet another new tool to manage your design subscription, we use the tools you already know.
If you prefer to work via email, no problem. Prefer Trello or Slack? We can do that too.
Our preference for project management is BaseCamp, Trello or Zendesk, but we know that teams already have their own workflows, so it’s entirely up to you how you want us to manage things.
For marking up projects with your feedback we use PDFs and Creative cloud (no login required) so you can simply view everything online and have your feedback integrated directly into our apps and files.
Our entire team make the ease of project communication a priority, so you always know what is going on.
Get started today