Nomi vs hiring a designer

One of these is a person. A freelancer you brief directly, or a small studio you retain, reads what you send, has an idea, and makes the thing themselves, priced by the hour or by the project. The other is Nomi, a session that already read your site, plans the campaign, writes the copy, and makes the ad in Meta's placements, priced by the month.

The reader this page is for already knows the freelance route. A brief written, days spent waiting, a round of changes before anything ships, and the next batch of ads starting the whole thing over. Nomi's argument is not that a person makes worse work. It is that most weeks the account does not need a new idea, it needs the last one made again, and that is the part a session can do without another brief.

What a designer does better

Taste. A person can tell an idea is wrong before it costs you anything, not only when a layout is off.
Judgement about what to say, not only how it looks. The angle, the joke, the thing worth saying this week is a decision Nomi does not make on its own.
Art direction. A shoot planned around a concept, with lighting and location chosen on purpose, rather than assembled from what a generator already knows how to draw.
Original photography and illustration. A real product in a real setting, or a drawn asset nobody else has used, not a still built from a prompt.
Someone who pushes back. A good designer tells you the idea is wrong before you spend money running it. Nomi has no opinion about your idea, only about how to make it.

Hiring a designer in sixty seconds

Hiring a designer usually means one of two things. You go straight to someone whose work you already like, on a referral or their own portfolio, and pay them by the hour or by the project. Or you post the brief to a marketplace: Upwork for an hourly hire, or 99designs, where the brief becomes a contest and several designers submit concepts before you pick a winner. A standard 99designs contest runs for seven days, split into a qualifying round anyone can enter and a final round with the handful of designers you liked best, and paying more collapses that to one to three days.

Either way, a person reads what you sent, asks questions if the brief is thin, and comes back with an idea before a single pixel is placed. What you get at the end is not assembled from a template. It is an ad somebody actually thought about, shot, drawn or laid out on purpose, by someone who can tell you why they made the choices they made.

What a session does that a brief cannot

Nomi starts before you ask for anything specific. Give it your website and it reads your pages, then comes back with your brand, your products, your markets and your buyers written out as drafts for you to correct. That first pass is the brief, and it only has to be corrected once.

From there you ask in a sentence and the work comes back inside the same session. It plans the campaign, runs a pass over the ads your competitors are actually running in your market right now, writes the copy and the script, and makes the creative in the shapes Meta's placements take.

The competitor pass is real ads rather than a mood board: ads delivered in the EU out of Meta's own ad library, what your competitors are running on Google, and what they are posting on TikTok, each one with how long it has been running.

When something in the finished ad is wrong, you point at it. Ring the spot, write what should be different there, queue as many changes as you noticed, and it comes back redrawn with them in it, in the same session, not a new thread with whoever is free this week.

And it writes down what it learns about the brand as it goes, in your own words, where you can read it and change it. That is why the second campaign does not start with a brief either.

Side by side

The job	Nomi	A designer
Where the idea comes from	It reads the ads your competitors are running now and works from what is already working in your market.	A person can propose something nobody else is doing yet, if you have the budget and the time for that.
Turnaround on one ad	Minutes, inside the same session.	Days: a 99designs contest runs seven days by default, or one to three if you pay to fast-track it.
Fixing one thing	Point at the spot on the finished ad and say what should change there.	Write the note, wait for the next round, and hope the read matches what you meant.
Original photography or illustration	Not made here.	Planned and shot or drawn around the brief.
Consistency across a growing batch	The fortieth ad reads from the same brand as the first.	Depends on whether the same person is still available and still remembers the last brief.
Cost past the first ad	The same monthly price, however many ads the month needs.	Every new batch is priced and briefed again from the start.

What each one costs

99designs prices a single ad the way a marketplace prices anything: per project. A banner ad runs €149 to €299 to hire a designer directly on their platform, or €49 to €189 for one of their fixed-price packages, where several designers submit concepts over a contest and you keep the one you pick. A social media design runs €79 to €429 hired directly, or €79 to €289 as a fixed package.

Priced by the hour instead, PayScale's wage survey puts the median rate for a freelance graphic designer at $38 an hour, with the middle of the market running from about $21 to $85. Clutch's rate guide, built from the design agencies listed there, puts agency pricing for the same kind of work, banners and signage, at $25 to $49 an hour.

And the price on the page is not the whole cost. There is the brief itself, written well enough that a stranger can execute it. There is the wait: a 99designs contest runs seven days by default, and you pay extra to cut that to one to three. There is a round of revisions before anything is final. And when the campaign needs a second batch, none of that is banked. The brief gets written again, for whoever picks up the account next.

Nomi is priced by the month rather than by the ad: €59 for one brand and two seats, €179 for three brands and five seats, €449 for every brand an agency runs, at fifteen seats. For one ad, once, a freelancer or a 99designs contest is very likely cheaper than a month of Nomi. The month starts paying for itself the moment a second batch is needed, because the brand is already there and nobody writes the brief again.

Which one to buy

For a lot of accounts the honest answer is both. A designer sets the idea and the brand once, and Nomi runs the volume inside it every week after.

Hire a designer if

You need one thing, once: a launch shoot, a rebrand, a campaign built around an idea nobody has run before.
The ad depends on a photo nobody has taken yet, or an illustration nobody has drawn yet.
You have the days to spend on the brief and the wait, and the budget for a person's full attention.

Buy Nomi if

You run the same brand's Meta ads every week, and every batch has to look like it came from the same place as the last one.
The next thing you need is a variation on what already works, not a new idea from zero.
You want a fix to the copy or the layout to take minutes, not another round with whoever is free.

Moving over from hiring a designer

Give Nomi your website
It reads your pages and comes back with your brand, your products, your markets and your buyers, written out as drafts.
Correct what it got wrong
Check it against what your designer already set: the colours, the tone, which products come first. Fix it once.
Ask for the first campaign
One sentence is enough. The plan, the copy and the creative come back in the shapes Meta's placements take.
Change it by pointing
Ring what is wrong on the finished ad, say what belongs there instead, and send the lot back at once.

Questions people ask

A single banner ad runs €149 to €299 to hire a designer directly on 99designs, or €49 to €189 through one of their fixed-price contest packages, as published on their pricing pages. A social media design runs €79 to €429 the same way. PayScale's wage survey puts the median hourly rate for a freelance graphic designer at $38, with most of the market between $21 and $85 an hour.

On 99designs, a standard contest runs seven days: a qualifying round where any designer can enter, then a final round with the ones you liked best. Paying for a fast-tracked contest cuts that to one to three days instead, with no separate rounds, as published on their help pages. Going direct to a freelancer is faster or slower depending entirely on how busy they are that week.

You post a brief once, and instead of hiring one person, several designers submit their own take on it over several days. You give feedback, drop the ones that miss, and pick a winner from whoever is left. You pay for one project rather than by the hour, and you own what you pick at the end.

Not by much, on the published numbers. Clutch's rate guide puts design agencies at $25 to $49 an hour for banners and signage. PayScale's wage survey puts the median individual freelancer at $38 an hour. The ranges overlap more than the reputations do.

Yes, if you brief them for it. A competent designer will size and lay out whatever formats you ask for. What they will not do without being asked again is make the fortieth ad the same way, without you re-explaining the brand.

No. Nomi has no taste, and it does not push back when an idea is wrong before you run it. What it does is hold the brand a designer already set and make the next batch of Meta ads from it, in a session rather than a new brief.

Yes, and for a lot of accounts that is the honest answer. A designer sets the idea and the brand once. Nomi runs the volume inside it every week after, without a new brief each time.

No. It makes statics and carousels for Meta's placements, working from the brand, products and past ads it already knows. A designer who shoots or draws is who you hire when the ad needs an image nobody has made yet.

€59 a month for one brand and two seats, €179 for three brands and five seats, and €449 for unlimited brands and fifteen seats.