I've worked at an agency my entire career (nine years so far)
Looks like there was poor project management and internal communication on their part, at the minimum their time tracking reports for tiny projects like yourself should be automated.
For small projects like this, we would keep the team to a minimum (lets say one PM, dev, and designer) and the web work wouldn't be started until everything design wise was completed (we do branding first before touching any UI type stuff to make sure the UI is on the same train of thought).
But yea, I wouldn't recommend hiring an agency unless you want to be hands off or having x amount of budget
You pretty much nailed it. Also can’t really hire a US based agency with US salaries and expect a rebrand to be cheap. OP also went though a ton of design rounds which is just throwing money away. It should have been capped in the contract to something much lower, like one or two designs.
Looks like there was poor project management and internal communication on their part, at the minimum their time tracking reports for tiny projects like yourself should be automated.
For small projects like this, we would keep the team to a minimum (lets say one PM, dev, and designer) and the web work wouldn't be started until everything design wise was completed (we do branding first before touching any UI type stuff to make sure the UI is on the same train of thought).
But yea, I wouldn't recommend hiring an agency unless you want to be hands off or having x amount of budget