Penji Review (2023): Pros & Cons, Features & 25% Discount

During the last months, I’ve been trying several unlimited design services and writing reviews about them, which you can find here.

Recently, I had the chance to try Penji, one of the leaders in the unlimited design market.

Here’s my unbiased review of Penji which includes: an explanation of how the service works, an analysis of their pros and cons, a deep dive into the company, and a list of some Penji alternatives.

If you’re already sure you want to go for Penji, click here and use this code to get a 25% discount: FAILORY25

What’s Penji?

Penji is one of the biggest unlimited design services.

You pay them a monthly, quarterly, or yearly fee and you get access to their team of designers to whom you can make unlimited design requests.

Unlimited? How can that be real?

You can send unlimited requests, but their designers will work on them one by one. So despite you ask for 1,000 logos, they will work on one logo at a time, finishing all the work probably in many months or years.

Why would I go with an unlimited design service?

Because, if you have recurring design tasks that need to be done, but not enough of them to hire a full-time designer, it can be much cheaper than hiring freelancers or agencies.

The way Penji can have so cheap prices is that the same designer that works for you, works for other companies, so his wage is distributed between many businesses.

Here’s all the information about the unlimited design service business model in case you want to learn more.

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Pros & Cons about Penji

Pros

Here are some of the main benefits of going with Penji instead of other unlimited design services:

• High design quality: Many unlimited design services provide work that’s just okay in terms of quality. Penji, in my opinion, is really over most of the other services in terms of quality and innovation.
• User-friendly dashboard: I think Penji’s internal dashboard, where you can send and manage your requests, is much better than any other I’ve tried. It’s super user-friendly and it has the correct features. I’ve particularly liked the feature to provide feedback to designers by clicking on the delivered work image. I also like that you get links to share the delivered designs with other people as well as a section to see all the past versions of the delivered work on each project.
• Powerful "Brands" feature: Penji makes it super easy for you to create unlimited “Brands” within your account and easily make design requests associated with one of them. This is particularly helpful if you’re an entrepreneur working on various brands or if you’re an agency or business providing services to various businesses.
• Affordable pricing: They are similar or even lower than the standards of the industry. Their “Team” plan pricing includes all the design tasks a business founder may need and turnaround times are perfect. If you’re in a rush or need many design requests, the “Daytime” plan and pricing make a lot of sense as well.
• Great company: The company is great. They care about social issues and do their contribution by donating 10% of the profits and providing their services for $1/month to non-profit organizations. Everyone I’ve talked to in the company has also been really friendly.

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Cons

Here are some cons of Penji in comparison to other unlimited design services:

• No website/app design: It’s not allowed in the cheapest plan. If you’re a business that needs many tasks of this category, you’ll have to go with a plan that’s $200 more expensive (not a big deal). Some unlimited design services offer this kind of design work even in their cheapest plan.
• Few communication channels: There’s no other communication method more than Penji’s internal dashboard (which is amazing, anyway). Most other unlimited design services allow you to send and manage requests over email, Slack, etc. You’ll have to add Penji’s dashboard as a new tool to check every day, instead of being able to have everything withing the tools you are already using.

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Others' Reviews

If you want to read other's thoughts about Penji, I recommend you to check G2 and Trustpilot. Out of 300 reviews in both platforms, 240 are 5 stars. 80% of the customers are extremely happy with Penji's services.

Also, here's a video review of the service:

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Penji’s Services

Penji used to offer design and development tasks, but it’s nowadays only focused on design.

Here are all the categories of design work Penji’s team does. Some of the most requested ones are:

• Ads
• App designs
• Banners
• Book covers
• Brand guidelines
• Business cards
• Catalogs
• Email templates
• Flyers
• Illustrations
• Packaging
• Social media posts
• T-shirts
• UX/UI
  

However, note that not all the categories are allowed on all of their plans. If you get Penji’s “Pro” plan (the cheapest one), you are allowed to request all tasks in all the categories except website & app design, custom illustrations, and infographics. These three categories of work are allowed for users on the “Team” or “Agency” plans.

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Print-On-Demand Services

A lot of people use Penji to get t-shirt designs for print-on-demand businesses, which are really common on the internet lately.

Penji’s team seems to have a vast knowledge of the print-on-demand business model and enjoys working with people who need designs for this kind of businesses.

They have even written an article where they explain how to make money online with Penji and the POD business model.

Penji’s team claim they can design 20-30 t-shirts per month, if you provide them with enough information and approve fast their delivered work. Below is an example of a t-shirt they have created for me.

If the t-shirts have many color variations or scalable designs, they claim to be able to make even 50-100 unique t-shirt designs per month.

All of the designs delivered will be trademark and copyright-free, so you won’t have any issues with the POD platforms. Penji’s team has worked with Red Bubble, Printful, Merch by Amazon, among other POD platforms, so they know their requirements.

If you're decided to subscribe to Penji, make sure to click here and use the cupon code FAILORY25 to get a 25% discount!

Penji’s Portfolio

The portfolio pages are the most important ones of unlimited design services.

Penji’s portfolio looks really solid and professional. All of their work is modern and fits design rules.

In my personal opinion, their app and website design examples are just okay, but design is really subjective so you may love them.

If you know you’ll be requesting a lot of one specific design, make sure to check examples of that category and even send Penji an email requesting for more of their work in that field.

Here’s a social media post they designed for me:

And here’s a t-shirt based on a quote I sent them:

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Penji’s Pricing

Penji has 3 plans, which can be paid monthly, quarterly (with a 15% discount), or yearly (with a 25% discount).

Penji gives you freedom, which means you won’t be bound to a contract. Once you subscribe to Penji, you’ll have the option to cancel your subscription anytime without additional cancellation fees. 

Another benefit when subscribing to Penji is its 30-day money-back guarantee offer. You can sign up and submit your first design request and try the service for 30 days. If you don’t like it, you request your money and cancel your subscription.

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Pro

The Pro Plan is suited for companies that only need graphic designs, logos and illustrations. This is excellent for startups and small businesses wanting to amp up their marketing materials. 

It’s priced at $499 a month, and the inclusions are:

• Unlimited graphic design projects
• Unlimited brands
• Unlimited revisions
• Unlimited users

With our 25% discount (code: FAILORY25), your first month will cost $374.

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Team

If apart from graphic design work, you also need web/app designs, presentations and animated graphics, then this plan is your best bet.

It’s priced at $699 a month, and the inclusions are:

• Everything in the Pro Plan
• Website and app design
• Presentations
• Animated graphics

With our 25% discount (code: FAILORY25), your first month will cost $524.

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Daytime

This is the best option for established businesses and agencies that have a steady flow of design projects or that require same-day delivery.

It’s priced at $999 a month, and the inclusions are:

• Everything in Team Plan
• USA daytime designers
• Same-day turnaround
• Dedicated art director
  

With our 25% discount (code: FAILORY25), your first month will cost $749.

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How to Apply the Promo Code

If you click here and select one of the plans, you'll immediately get the 25% discount in your first month.

If you want to apply it manually, you have to visit Penji, select one of the plans and select "Billing: Monthly". Where it says "Promo code", you write "FAILORY25".

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How Penji Works

I don’t want to make this a tutorial, because Penji’s dashboard is so user-friendly that I’m sure you won’t have any issues using it.

However, I wanted to do an overview of how does Penji work and how’s the process of submitting requests and giving feedback or approving the work delivered.

Once you have become a Penji customer, the first thing they recommend you to do is to set up your brand details.

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Brands

Logged in into the dashboard, go to “Brands”. You’ll see this:

If you click “Create brand”, you are asked to fill a form with the following fields:

• Brand name
• Industry
• Description of the brand
• Website
• Brand guideline (you can upload a file)
• Brand colors (you can select various by writing their Hex codes).
• Attachments (you can upload other files, like logo, icons, fonts, etc).

If you run an agency, the Brands section is really powerful, as you can set up a Brand for every client you have and it that way avoid Penji’s designer confusion on which colors, fonts, logos, etc they should use on each of your requests.

Once the brand is added, you can click on it and you’ll see all the tasks requested related to that brand.

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People

The next thing you can do is to invite people from your team to help you send and review design requests.

Note that every plan has a different amount of users you’re allowed to invite, so be careful with the number of invitations you send.

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Projects

It’s now time to submit a request. Go to the “Project board” section.

Click on “New project”. There, you’ll be asked a title for the project and to select a design category of a dropdown menu. If none of the options there fits what you’re looking for, you can go with a custom project.

Depending on the design category you choose, you’ll be asked different things, but you’ll always have to fill in a description of the project, upload some attachments if you want, select the source file type you want, and choose an associated brand for that task.

Once the project is created, Penji will assign you one of their designers and they will start working on your task. The amount of time it takes them to deliver depends a lot on the type of task you request, but for most of the tasks, 24-48 hours should be enough (they don’t work on Sundays).

Once the first version of the work is delivered, you have the chance to approve it or ask for changes. One of my favorite Penji features is that you can comment your feedback directly into the design, making communication much more effective. You can also make comments on the chat that’s opened between you and your designer.

Revisions are done over the following 24 hours. You can, once more, accept the work or review it until you completely like it. On the side of the chat, there’s a tab where you can see all the versions of the delivered work.

Eventually, you like the design, you download your files and the project is finished. At that moment, designers will start to work on your next project (if you have already submitted one).

Remember you can submit the amount of project requests you want, but designers will work on them one by one.

Who’s Behind Penji?

Penji’s co-founders Johnathan Grzybowski and Khai Tran used to run a full-service agency offering SEO, web design and development, social media marketing, and more.

But both founders started to feel they lacked the passion that a company should be built on. After a trip to Vietnam, both founders re-assessed their company values and re-evaluated their mission.

Both knew first-hand how challenging it was for entrepreneurs to find reliable graphic design services because they had been in that situation before. Looking for a way to offer a top-notch service that gave startups and small businesses a chance, they came up with Penji’s idea. 

Penji was launched on October 21, 2017, with 4 employees. Since then, Penji has grown to 50 employees, which they have taken their time to vet and test. They claim to accept only 2% of the designers that apply to their jobs and to be constantly testing and improving their team’s design quality.

Jonathan and Khai have bootstrapped Penji without any funding to become an Inc 5000 company. Nowadays, they work with more than 1,000 companies, including some incredible ones like Rebook, Lyft, AWeber, and more.

One of the things I like about Penji is how founders want to have some social impact. They donate 10% of their profits to organizations that help people, as well as allow nonprofits to subscribe to Penji for only $1/month.

You can read more about Penji’s company here.

If you're decided to subscribe to Penji, make sure to click here and use the cupon code FAILORY25 to get a 25% discount!

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Penji Alternatives

If you’re not convinced by Penji, I’d recommend you to check our full list of unlimited design services.

In Penji’s category of prices, I think Penji is one of the best solutions, along with Kimp.

If you have a bigger budget, I’d recommend you to go with DesignJoy, particularly due to their innovative and high-quality designs. Here’s a review I’ve written about them (+ a 10% discount).

If you’re still unsure on which service to choose, do not hesitate to send me an email at nico@failory.com!

Conclusion: Should You Get Penji?

Without a doubt, Penji is a really great fit with businesses looking to outsource some design tasks at an affordable price.

The quality of the work they deliver is over the standards and the experience of using Penji is the best in the market.

So yes, you should get Penji! Make sure to click here and use the code FAILORY25 to get a 25% off in your first month.

If you have any questions about Penji or unlimited design services in general, please send me an email at nico@failory.com.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What’s Penji?

Penji is one of the biggest unlimited design services. You pay them a monthly, quarterly, or yearly fee and you get access to their team of designers to whom you can make unlimited design requests.

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Does Penji offer a free trial?

Penji does not offer a free trial, but they provide a 15-day money-back guarantee offer. You can sign up and submit your first design request and try the service for 15 days. If you don’t like it, you request your money and cancel your subscription.

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How much does Penji cost?

Penji has 3 plans (Pro, Team, Daytime). The Pro Plan is priced at $499 a month, the Team Plan at $699 a month, and the Daytime Plan at $999 a month.