$5? At $50/hr that's about 6 minutes; at $30 an hour that's 10 minutes. Barely enough time to load up a stock file, slap some text on it in Illustrator, make so

$5? At $50/hr that's about 6 minutes; at $30 an hour that's 10 minutes. Barely enough time to load up a stock file, slap some text on it in Illustrator, make some default gradients, and call it a day. And that's exactly what you get. Cheap things are cheap because 1) they take very little materials/labor to make, or 2) they cost a lot to make, but there's a lot of it and the cost is spread over many duplicates. In this case, you're getting the latter, obviously. And you get what you pay for. I'd say, if you're the kind of person who thinks paying for a $5 logo or $300 logo is good enough, you might as well learn Illustrator yourself and whip something easy out, since it will satisfy your two constraints: 1) it's cheap/free, and 2) it looks okay to you but not to anyone else, but that's fine, because the $5 logo would have performed the same role anyways. This is like asking: "What kind of branding do you get for $5?" "What kind of a PR rep do you get for $5?" Etc, etc.