I’m a little puzzled by your reasoning. They’re successful and influential, which makes you want to “go low.” Why? I noticed RKK removed the prices from your post, so I won’t mention them, but, yeah, they were much lower than I would consider as someone working in the U.S.
If you were doing this kind of work full-time, you’d go broke undercharging for your services. By the time your rent, utilities, insurance, taxes and other bills were paid, you wouldn’t cover your costs, let alone making a profit.
If you want to do this person a favor, that’s one thing, but let’s assume it’s purely a business transaction. What difference does it make whether this is for a small or large business? When you fill up your car with gasoline, does the person who owns the gas station charge you less or more based on what he thinks you can pay?
The owner of this “very successful” and “influential” business understands the need to, first, cover costs and, second, to make a profit. This person didn’t become successful by undercharging, so why would you be inclined to low-ball your prices?
Quite possibly, this person might not realize how much time goes into these kinds of things, which wouldn’t be unusual. He or she might be mislead by the crowdsourcing sites that seem to indicate the going rates for logos is, like, $40. If so, fine, let them use one of these sites and, maybe, a pimply faced 13-year-old with a pirated version of Photoshop will do the job for them.
Even if that’s the case, do you really want to compete with a 13-year-old (or whomever) for bottom-feeder business? Personally, I just won’t do business with people who fail to respect the time and expertise that good design requires and who won’t pay for what my time and expertise are worth. This business, if they really are successful, likely expects to pay for what the job’s worth. If not, personally, I’d decline the job.
In addition, it’s not standard practice to charge extra for people who want to own their logos as opposed to only buying usage rights for them. Business owners would be foolish to allow designers to retain ownership of their logos. For that matter, most graphic design is custom work and can’t really be resold to others, so again, it’s not standard practice to think in terms of charging extra for “universal rights.”
This reasoning doesn’t hold for photographers and illustrators who can potentially resell their images to others and where limited usage rights are common. For most graphic design work, however, this logic falls apart given that, as a practical matter, the work can’t typically be resold to others down the road.
The standard practice for something like you’ve described is to simply charge enough to cover your costs and make whatever profit is needed with the expectation of signing over the copyright to the logo upon payment. In other words, build that extra fee into the base price rather than itemizing it as an add-on, like you might do when drawing an illustration, for say, a magazine that only needs the illustration for one issue.