The revision counter is a business model, not a design process

Almost every design listing you will read includes a revision count. Three rounds, five rounds, ten for the premium tier. It reads like a consumer protection: here is exactly what you get, no ambiguity. In practice it changes the incentive on both sides of the table, and not in the client’s favour.

What a counter does to the client

The moment revisions are finite, a client starts rationing feedback. They batch up notes they are not sure about. They stop saying "I do not know why, but something is off" because it feels like a wasted round. They approve something they are seventy per cent happy with because round three is the last free one and the alternative is an invoice.

Seventy per cent happy is the worst possible outcome for a logo. It is the mark that quietly gets replaced in eighteen months, which means the whole exercise is paid for twice.

What it does to the designer

It rewards the wrong first move. If you have three rounds, the safe play is to open with three noticeably different directions and let the client pick, rather than to interrogate the brief and commit to the one that fits. Breadth is cheap insurance against running out of rounds. It is also how you end up with four mediocre concepts instead of one good one.

It also creates the most unpleasant conversation in this business, which is telling somebody their next note costs money.

What unlimited actually means here

It does not mean infinite patience with an unchanged brief, and it does not mean a project without an end. It means the design finishes when it is right rather than when a counter empties. In fifteen years of doing it this way, the number of jobs that genuinely ran long is small enough to be a rounding error, because a well-interrogated brief converges fast.

• The average job still lands in two or three rounds. Removing the limit did not change the median, it changed what happens in the tail.
• Where a project does run long, the cause is almost always a decision that had not been made when the brief was written — a name still in flux, a second stakeholder appearing at round four.
• The one thing that does reset the clock is a change of direction rather than a refinement. "Make it navy" is a revision. "Actually we have renamed the company" is a new brief, and we will say so.

How to tell which kind you are buying

1. 1Ask what happens after the last included round. If there is a per-round price, that is the model, whatever the marketing says.
2. 2Ask whether a direction change counts as a revision. This is where limits bite hardest.
3. 3Ask who decides a round has been used. If it is the studio, and the definition is vague, assume the vague reading favours them.