Metalab Review (2026): What the Design Agency Costs, Who It Works With, and Is It Worth It
Oct 22, 202613 min readRated 5.0/5 by Siddharth Vij
Author
Siddharth Vij
Co-Founder, Bricx
Siddharth Vij is the Co-Founder & design lead at Bricx, a website and UX design agency working with B2B and AI SaaS companies.
Metalab is a product design and engineering studio from British Columbia, Canada, founded in 2006. It designs and builds web and mobile products, brands and websites for companies from early-stage startups to the Fortune 500.
Its portfolio is one of the strongest in the industry, and the same team designs the product, builds it and hands it over to your engineers.
What's hard to find is everything else a buyer needs. Metalab publishes no prices, no contract terms and no client reviews.
The one public number is steep. Metalab's Clutch profile sets the minimum project at $100,000+.
I've spent years hiring designers and selling design work to software founders, though I haven't hired Metalab myself.
This review pulls together what you can check before a first call: who owns and runs Metalab, what it costs, how its teams work, what its track record shows and who it suits.
TL;DR
- What Metalab does: product strategy, product design, brand, websites and engineering for web and mobile products. It's a remote-first studio based in British Columbia, Canada, founded in 2006.
- Pricing: there's no public price list. Clutch lists a $100,000+ minimum project and an undisclosed hourly rate.
- Ownership: Metalab is part of Tiny, founder Andrew Wilkinson's holding company, and Luke Des Cotes is CEO.
- How engagements work: small teams of design, product and engineering, each dedicated to one client, with a gradual handoff to your own developers.
- Clutch reviews: none. The profile reads "Not yet reviewed", so references are the only way to check fit.
- Best fit: well-funded companies defining a flagship product, with a budget well above $100,000.
- Best Metalab alternative for B2B and AI SaaS: Bricx, which designs and builds the website and the product with one senior team, with projects starting at $25,000.
Metalab at a glance
| Metalab | |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2006, by Andrew Wilkinson |
| Owner | Tiny, Andrew Wilkinson's holding company |
| CEO | Luke Des Cotes |
| Location | British Columbia, Canada. Clutch lists Vancouver as HQ plus a Victoria office; Tiny says Victoria |
| Team | 50 to 249 people on Clutch, spread across 18+ countries |
| Services | Product strategy, product design, brand, websites and engineering |
| Track record | 475+ products shipped and 24 unicorns, per Metalab |
| Minimum project | $100,000+ on Clutch |
| Hourly rate | Undisclosed |
| Clutch reviews | None yet |
What does Metalab do?
Metalab's homepage. Source: metalab.com.
Metalab designs and builds digital products end to end, from product strategy through to shipped code. Its tagline is "We make interfaces".
Its case studies are tagged with six kinds of work:
| Service | Example from Metalab's work page |
|---|---|
| Product strategy and vision | Future-state concepting with Loom's product teams and for Expensify |
| Product design | Midjourney's original interface and a new advisory product for Robinhood |
| Brand and websites | A full rebrand and website for Windsurf, and a redesign of webflow.com |
| Engineering | Frontend work for Uber, plus engineering on Suno and Waking Up |
| UX research | Research alongside design for The Athletic and Calvin Klein |
| Motion and interaction design | Work with the Fanatics Live design team |
Product design is the biggest share of the work at 40%, according to Clutch. Custom software development and UX/UI design take 25% each, and branding takes 10%.
A quarter of the business is engineering, so Metalab builds what it designs.
AI is now a big part of the work, with its own page on the site.
In a July 2026 episode of Software Engineering Daily, VP of Engineering Wesley Yu said the team is working toward designers prompting Claude Code to open pull requests, with a developer reviewing every change.
Who owns Metalab, and who runs it?
Metalab is owned by Tiny, the holding company of its founder, Andrew Wilkinson. Metalab was his first business, started in 2006 on an island in British Columbia.
Tiny describes itself as a long-term owner, not a day-to-day operator. Metalab keeps its own leadership, clients and product roadmap.
The CEO is Luke Des Cotes. He also runs Metalab Ventures, a $15 million fund that invests in product-led startups, so Metalab both designs for early-stage companies and invests in them.
Who are Metalab's clients?
Metalab's work page, filterable by stage and industry. Source: metalab.com/work.
Metalab's clients range from early-stage startups to the Fortune 500, and the list is its strongest selling point. By its own count, it has shipped 475+ products, including 24 unicorns, used by more than 2.2 billion people.
For a software buyer, the clients fall into three groups.
Early work with companies that became category leaders. Metalab designed Slack's earliest interface and original brand, Coinbase's first consumer app and Uber's early rider experience. It also took Notarize "from MVP to unicorn".
These are archive case studies, so they show what Metalab did for those companies years ago.
AI companies. Metalab designed Midjourney's original interface and later helped build Rooms, its multiplayer space. Suno started as a brand project and grew into brand, product design and engineering.
For Windsurf, Metalab built a brand system across the marketing site and the product. Modular, Bardeen, Together.ai, PlayerZero and Otter are on the list too.
The Windsurf case study, tagged Brand and Website. Source: metalab.com/work/windsurf.
Long enterprise relationships. Walmart was a client for 10 years across design and development. The relationship started because Metalab's then-CTO contributed to an open-source framework Walmart used.
Metalab has also run five major projects in three years for Uber, and spent a year and a half rebuilding Tripadvisor's core mobile app. Nike, Loom, Atlassian, Docusign and Robinhood are clients as well.
The Midjourney case study, tagged Product Design and Product Strategy. Source: metalab.com/work/midjourney.
Read the case studies with care. Most cards describe a project in one sentence, and the numbers on them are usually the client's scale, such as Robinhood's 25M+ investors, not a result of Metalab's work.
Some claims stretch further. Metalab links the Windsurf rebrand to the company's $2.4 billion deal with Google, and a deal like that depends on far more than a brand.
The numbers also drift between pages. The work page gives the Waking Up app nearly 40,000 five-star reviews, while a 2023 Metalab guide says over 50,000.
How much does Metalab charge?
Metalab's Clutch profile. Source: clutch.co/profile/metalab.
Metalab's projects start at $100,000, according to its Clutch profile. There's no price list on its site, and its hourly rate is undisclosed.
Across the 57 agencies benchmarked in The State of UI/UX Design Agencies 2026, pricing looks like this next to Metalab's:
| Metalab | 57 benchmarked agencies | |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed-price product project | $100,000+ minimum | Median around $43,000; top end over $150,000 |
| Hourly rate | Undisclosed | Median $55 to $90; US agencies average about $150 |
| Price shared upfront | No | 60% wouldn't price product design before a second conversation |
Is Metalab expensive?
Yes. Its minimum is more than double the median fixed-price product project in the same study. The highest hourly rate any agency quoted there was $195, for a senior US-based team, which is the bracket a studio at Metalab's level sits in.
If a smaller first version is all you need right now, this breakdown of MVP design costs for SaaS and AI products shows what that scope usually costs.
How do you get a quote from Metalab?
Through the contact form. There's no pricing page, and the form asks about your product, timeline, location and company stage, from early-stage startup to enterprise.
There's no pricing page. The route in is this form, which asks for your company stage. Source: metalab.com/contact.
Contract terms aren't published either, so take these four questions into the first call. Keep a longer list of questions to ask a UX design agency for the follow-ups.
- How is it billed? Among the 57 agencies benchmarked, 45% billed time and materials, 35% fixed price and 20% ran a retainer. Half took an upfront deposit followed by milestone payments.
- Who exactly is on the team? Ask for names, roles and seniority, and what share of the budget each person takes.
- What happens at handoff? Metalab prefers to run three or four sprints alongside whoever will maintain the product, so ask whether you need to hire that person first.
- Who owns the work? Confirm in writing that you own the code and design files.
What is it like to work with Metalab?
You get a small cross-functional team of design, product and engineering that works only on your project. Metalab's teams are dedicated to one client at a time, and each developer works on one project at a time.
Work runs in two to three week sprints that cover design, testing, development and QA. Metalab's own guidance is that a new team takes four to five sprints, about four months, to find its groove.
Product definition can be fast. Metalab's product leads have defined a validated product in as little as five weeks by running strategy and design in parallel from kickoff.
A brand takes six to eight weeks, with weekly check-ins.
On engineering, Metalab picks a stack based first on what your team can maintain and second on what the product needs. Its developers work across React Native, Swift and React, with Expo and Next.js as core tools.
Handoff is gradual. The engineer who will take over sits in on pull request reviews for the last few sprints.
Two practical points before you sign:
- Time zones. The team is remote-first across 18+ countries and keeps only "a small overlap with our clients", so confirm which hours your core team works.
- Team size. Across those 57 agencies, 41% ran a pod of three to five people and 37% a lean team of two or three. Ask what team Metalab proposes, and for a narrow job, weigh a UX agency against a freelancer.
Does Metalab have client reviews?
No. Metalab's Clutch profile reads "Not yet reviewed", with no rating, review count or client quotes. That's unusual for an agency this well known.
Its Google listing in Victoria shows a 4.9 rating from 12 reviews, but the snippets shown don't describe client projects.
The gap doesn't mean the work is weak. Metalab has grown through referrals and its portfolio, and a 10-year relationship like Walmart's is its own kind of review.
On awards, Metalab lists itself among Fast Company's Most Innovative Design Companies for 2026. It was also a Design Company of the Year finalist in 2024.
It does mean you'll have to check fit yourself. Ask for two or three references from companies at your stage, and ask them how the team was staffed, how the final cost compared with the estimate and what happened after launch.
Metalab pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Client list from Slack and Coinbase to Midjourney, Suno and Windsurf | $100,000+ minimum on Clutch, more than double the market median for product projects |
| Design, product and engineering in one team | No public pricing or contract terms |
| Teams dedicated to one client at a time | No Clutch reviews to check |
| Deep AI portfolio, and AI tools used in its own workflow | Several famous case studies are archive work from years ago |
| Long relationships, such as 10 years with Walmart | Case studies rarely isolate a result, and some numbers differ between pages |
| Founder-backed, with a ventures arm that invests in startups | A full cross-functional team can be more than a Seed or Series A company needs |
Is Metalab worth it?
For a large or late-stage company with a flagship product to define, yes. Few studios have shipped as many products people actually use, and its AI work shows the team is current.
Metalab makes sense when:
- the budget clears $100,000 comfortably and the product is central to the company's next stage
- you're defining a new product or a 0 to 1 bet and want strategy, design and build from one team
- the product and the brand need to be designed together
- you'll hire the engineers who take the product over, ideally before the handoff starts
Look elsewhere when:
- you're Seed to Series B and the budget is in the tens of thousands, in which case a shortlist of product design agencies at that stage is a better starting point
- the job is a website redesign around a fundraise, on a tight deadline, where a SaaS website design agency will usually move faster
- you want public pricing and verified reviews before a first call
The catch is price and transparency. A six-figure minimum, no published rates and no third-party reviews make Metalab hard to judge from the outside.
For most Series A and B SaaS teams, a full cross-functional team is also more than the job needs.
Whoever you pick, choose a studio that builds what it designs. Across those 57 agencies, 45% handed development to an outside partner and 20% didn't build at all.
If you want a head-to-head, I've also compared Metalab vs Bricx.
Best Metalab Alternative for Funded B2B and AI SaaS Teams: Bricx
If the $100,000+ minimum, or having no client reviews to read before the first call, is what gave you pause about Metalab, Bricx is the alternative I'd point a funded B2B or AI SaaS team to.
Bricx is a premium design partner for B2B and AI SaaS companies that treat design taste as a moat. It works only with software companies and includes design engineering, so the team that designs the website or product also builds it.
Like Metalab, Bricx covers the whole job: website redesigns with the build always included, product redesigns led by a fractional design lead with a senior designer, ongoing creative, and add-ons such as front-end engineering, design systems, and motion and launch videos.
The difference is the entry point, because Bricx projects start at $25,000.
AI product work is where the two overlap most. Writesonic brought Bricx in to design its AI search visibility platform, and the project summary on Clutch lists user interviews, a redesigned dashboard and new AI-powered tools.
Unlike Metalab, Bricx has reviews you can check before you talk to anyone. It holds a 5.0 rating on Clutch across 32 verified reviews, and the newest are from 2025 and 2026.
In one from November 2025, the CEO of an AI software company in San Francisco reviews branding and UX/UI work that covered the company's website, web app and IDE extension, and scores Bricx 5.0 on quality, schedule and cost.
Metalab's other strength, taking a new product from zero to launch, is also something Bricx does at startup scale. For Thrust, Bricx handled the branding and built the gamified MVP.
Bricx runs fixed-scope projects, monthly retainers, embedded teams and paid pilot sprints, so a team can start with a defined launch and keep going if it works.
Over the last two years Bricx has shipped 50+ websites for software companies, for clients including Writesonic, Sybill, Hobbes and CAMB.AI, and it's a Webflow Certified Partner and a Framer Expert.
It isn't a fit for non-software businesses or budgets under $25,000.
| Metalab | Bricx | |
|---|---|---|
| Clients | Startups to Fortune 500, across industries | B2B and AI SaaS companies only |
| Model | Not published | Fixed-scope projects, retainers, embedded teams or pilot sprints |
| Team | Cross-functional team of design, product and engineering | Senior team led by a design lead |
| Scope | Product strategy, product design, brand, websites, engineering | Website, product, brand, motion and launch video |
| Build | Frontend, mobile and web engineering | Design engineering included on every website |
| Price | $100,000+ minimum project on Clutch | Projects start at $25,000 |
| Clutch | No reviews yet | 5.0 from 32 reviews |
How I researched this Metalab review
I haven't worked with Metalab, so every fact above comes from a source you can check:
- Metalab's own pages: metalab.com (home, work, AI, fintech, about, contact), its case studies, its blog, and a February 2026 studio profile Metalab wrote for Codrops
- Metalab's leaders in public: Wesley Yu on Software Engineering Daily (July 2026) and Luke Des Cotes's SXSW London speaker bio
- Third-party profiles: Metalab's Clutch profile, its Google business listing and Tiny's page on Metalab
- Market benchmarks: The State of UI/UX Design Agencies 2026 gave 57 design agencies the same brief and compared what each one quoted, how it staffed the work and how long it said delivery would take. Wherever this review compares Metalab to "the market", the figure comes from that study.
Where a number is Metalab's own claim, I've said so. I couldn't find any public client reviews of Metalab on Clutch, and I haven't relied on anonymous forum posts.
Questions people ask about Metalab
Who is the owner of Metalab?
Tiny, the holding company of founder Andrew Wilkinson, owns Metalab. It has been part of Tiny from the start and runs with its own leadership and clients.
Who is the CEO of Metalab?
Luke Des Cotes. He also leads Metalab Ventures, a $15 million fund that invests in product-led startups, according to his SXSW London bio.
What does Metalab do?
Metalab designs and builds digital products: product strategy, product design, brand, websites and engineering, for clients from early-stage startups to the Fortune 500.
How many employees does Metalab have?
Clutch puts Metalab at 50 to 249 people. In 2024 Metalab said it had 160+ people across 15+ countries, and in 2026 it described a team spread across 18+ countries.
Where is Metalab located?
British Columbia, Canada. Clutch lists Vancouver as headquarters with a second office in Victoria, while Tiny describes Victoria as home. The team itself has been fully remote since day one.
How much does Metalab charge?
At least $100,000 a project, according to its Clutch profile. There's no public price list, and the hourly rate is undisclosed.
Did Metalab design Slack?
Yes. Metalab designed Slack's earliest interface and original brand, working from the prototype Slack brought to it in its early days.
Is Metalab the same as MetaLab supplements?
No. Metalab the design agency is unrelated to the supplement brands and other products that share the name in search results.
What is the best Metalab alternative for a SaaS company?
For funded B2B and AI SaaS teams that need the website, the product and the build handled by one senior team, Bricx is the strongest Metalab alternative. Bricx projects start at $25,000 and hold a 5.0 rating on Clutch.
