It’s no secret that hiring and employing an in-house design team is a significant cost to a company, especially if the business’s design needs are wide-ranging.
That’s why an increasing number of businesses are turning to creative services platforms that provide access to talented creatives at a lower cost than hiring a full-time employee or team, allowing them to scale up affordably.
Superside touts itself as a Creative-as-a-Service solution, offering several price points for access to an adept force of web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, and much more.
In this article, we’ll cover what Superside is, how much it costs, and how the process works. Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
What Are The Pros & Cons Of Using Superside?
What’s It Like To Work With Superside?
What Is Superside?
Superside is the brainchild of entrepreneur Fredrik Thomassen. Originally called “Konsus,” the platform was born in 2015 in the tech mecca of Palo Alto, California. This company likes to call its subscription model “Creative-as-a-Service.” They say busy companies will save money on marketing by outsourcing their graphic design projects to Superside’s multinational staff.
Superside says it provides a large variety of design services, ranging from concept creation to motion design. The company has been busy since its creation in 2015, having provided more than 62,000 projects to some 450 clients.
Thomassen said on the company website that Superside empowers businesses to streamline the design process and increase the output of design assets while allowing teams to focus on their top priorities.
The service is targeted at businesses working to scale up and enterprise companies, Thomassen said. Superside combines exclusive talent from around the world with a purposeful platform to make the customer experience “faster, better, and cheaper” than crowded freelance marketplaces and conventional marketing agencies.
How Does Superside Work?
Superside clients pay a flat rate for a fixed amount of hours to be used at their disposal each month. The client has hours dedicated to various tasks, which include project management, design time, quality control, and design direction. Every client at Superside is assigned a specific project manager, so they are not shuffled between different people from day to day.
If you are a Superside client, you can choose standard delivery, which is 48 hours or longer, or fast turnarounds in 12 to 24 hours. While the fast turnaround projects shoot your projects up the priority list, they lose some perks of standard delivery, like revisions.
You use the platform to submit your project requests, and your project manager is notified immediately. The project manager looks at the project, how complex it is, and all of the requirements. They then provide you with a quote, determine how long it will take, and confirm the date of delivery. There is a three-hour minimum on all Superside projects.
The design time, design direction, project management, and quality control hours included in your plan are predetermined.
The plans you choose from allow you to focus on various abilities, skills, and turnaround times within those allotted hours.
In one example, a Level 1 Communications package, you are allotted 60 hours to complete tasks like creating presentations, print designs, eBook and digital report designs, and email designs, all of which require graphic design and illustration skills. You can pick priority or standard delivery for your projects in this example.
How Much Does Superside Cost?
Superside offers three packages of varying costs and complexity.
The Design Essentials package starts at $5,000 per month, and the company suggests it for average design needs. It includes the following:
- Presentation Design
- Print, Packaging & Merch
- Static Web & Social Assets
- Email Design
- Illustration Design
- Ebook & Digital Reports
- Web Design
The Digital Advertising plan costs $7,500 per month and is recommended for companies looking to expand their advertising online.
It includes:
- Digital Marketing Consulting
- Web Design
- Ar/3d Design
- Email Design
- Static Web & Social Assets
- Illustration Design
- Presentation Design
- Motion Design
- Digital Ads & Social Media
- Campaign Concepting
- Video Production
The End-to-End Creative package starts at $9,000 per month and is the most popular plan, according to the Superside website. It includes all of the aforementioned benefits.
Included in all of the plans:
- Bespoke onboarding for new users
- A Dedicated Team Made Of Project Managers, Designers, Creative Directors, And Customer Success Managers
- Support Of Multiple Brands
- Complete Timezone Coverage
- 50% Of Total Hours Can Be For Fast Turnaround In 12 Or 24 Hours
- Unlimited Users On The Superside Platform
What Are The Pros & Cons Of Using Superside?
Prominent, well-known brands like Google, Amazon, and Meta highly recommend Superside.
The platform has extremely good reviews on sites like G2, with 4.9 out of 5 stars.
Superside Pros
Easy to work with: Reviewers say the platform has a great user experience and great customer service. They praise Superside’s response to edit requests and their ability to take on many different projects simultaneously.
Well-established: The platform has been in business for nearly a decade and boasts an impressive slate of case studies with prominent companies and brands you’ve heard of.
Comprehensive Design Offerings: For graphic design work, its end-to-end creative package is quite thorough, providing design for many different types of projects and animation design.
Superside Cons
Expensive: Superside has a flat-rate subscription plan of three packages, each of which has several different tiers. The very cheapest plan starts at $5,000 per month, which is a not-inconsiderable price tag for small businesses and solopreneurs. Many other platforms are more economical.
Limited to Design: While the graphic design abilities of Superside are extensive, they are quite firmly in that niche. They do not provide other outsourceable tasks like voice-over work, copywriting, or virtual assistants. If you want help with any of those kinds of projects, you may need to look elsewhere.
Work Varies Based On Assigned Creative: While each client has a dedicated Creative Project Manager, creatives are assigned through an internal process, and reviewers say the work can vary in quality based on the creative’s knowledge of the brand.
What’s It Like To Work With Superside?
Superside boasts of a highly selective hiring process, which relies on outreach and a referral network. Candidates undergo extensive interviews, assessments, portfolio evaluations, and reference checks before being hired. According to the website, they only hired 3 percent of the last 10,000 people who applied.
Superside has 4 out of 5 stars on Glassdoor, with 79 percent of reviewers saying they would recommend the company to a friend. Reviewers list the perks of the business as the flexible work hours and the friendly team. However, the negative reviews say the cons of the company include a lack of transparency, issues with work/life balance, constant changes to processes, and bonus formulas being reduced over time.
Despite these drawbacks, the company’s Glassdoor page is flooded with people trying to get a referral.
Alternatives To Superside
Fortunately, if Superside doesn’t sound like the platform for you, there are plenty of alternatives for flat-rate outsourced design on the market.
Perhaps the most well-known option is Fiverr, a freelance marketplace website offering an incredibly diverse slate of options. It is considerably more affordable, but it’s crowded, and there are fewer arrangements like Project Managers and the ability to have many projects going simultaneously in an organized fashion.
Another option is Flocksy. It is a smaller company and offers more affordable plans for startups and SMEs. It also offers dedicated project managers and allows companies to build their teams of creatives so they can grow with creatives who are familiar with their company and their brand.
Design Pickle is another alternative to Superside. G2 says its reviewers report Design Pickle’s associates are “more professional” than Superside employees.
Is Superside Worth It?
When you are looking for an option to outsource your graphic design needs, it makes sense that you would look for the best in the business. Superside’s platform provides businesses access to a large workforce of designers who can take on many more projects simultaneously than a small in-house team would be able to do.
Its flat-rate subscription model includes design time and direction, quality control, and project management, which is more than some services provide. Superside offers three different base packages of varying costs and complexity, each of which offers a fixed amount of hours to clients monthly.
Superside provides a comprehensive slate of design projects and end-to-end services in its more extensive plans. It lacks some services others offer, like copywriting, video editing, virtual assistant services, and voice-over work.
Many prominent and well-known brands have allowed their logos to adorn the Superside website as satisfied customers, including Reddit, Salesforce, and Kellogg’s. The platform boasts better-than-average reviews on major review sites like G2 and TrustPilot.
Although the platform is significantly pricier than many other alternatives, it is a thorough and efficient solution for businesses that need comprehensive design services but cannot afford to hire an in-house design team.
