What a website actually costs in Dubai, and why quotes vary by 10x
You will get quotes from AED 3,000 to AED 300,000 for what sounds like the same brief. Here is what actually drives the number.
Muhammad Ilyas · Co-founder and CEO
Ask five Dubai agencies to quote the same brief and you will get five numbers that look like they are for different projects. That is not necessarily anyone being dishonest. It usually means five different assumptions about who is doing the work you have not thought about yet.
What actually moves the price
- Who writes the content. This is the biggest single variable and the one most quotes leave silent.
- How many systems the site has to talk to. A contact form is free. A CRM, a payment gateway and a delivery integration is a project.
- Whether it is bilingual. Arabic done properly is not a translation line item, it is a layout and editorial commitment.
- Who edits it afterwards. Building for a non technical marketing hire costs more up front and far less over three years.
Where our numbers sit
We publish ours because guessing wastes everyone's time. Focused builds start at AED 18,000. Most companies land on the AED 35,000 growth build, which is where Arabic and real integrations come in. Ecommerce and custom application work starts at AED 60,000.
The costs nobody puts in the proposal
Three, consistently, and they are what turn a cheap quote expensive. Hosting runs a few hundred to a couple of thousand dirhams a year. Maintenance, meaning updates, backups and monitoring, is a monthly cost whether or not your agency does it. And content production is frequently assumed by the client to be included and by the agency not to be.
Cheap is fine, unclear is not
There is nothing wrong with a AED 8,000 website if what you need is a credible five page presence and you are writing the copy. The problem is a AED 8,000 quote for a brief that was always going to need AED 30,000 of work, because that gap gets closed later through change requests, or through corners you find out about after launch.
Get the scope written down. Page count, content ownership, integrations, languages, and what happens when something changes. An agency that will not put those in writing has told you something useful.
