Ask five Dubai agencies for a website and you will get five numbers that differ by a factor of twenty. That is not because four of them are lying. It is because "a website" describes a template installed in an afternoon and a bilingual, integrated, custom-built product with equal accuracy. This guide is for the founder trying to read those quotes: what the bands are, what moves a number between them, and what a low number usually leaves out.
The three bands
Template and freelancer work, roughly AED 3,000 to 15,000. A WordPress, Wix or Shopify theme, your logo and copy dropped in, a contact form. Fast and fine for a business that needs an address on the internet and nothing more. What it cannot do is be different from the thousand other sites on the same theme, load fast on a phone once the plugins pile up, or be extended without starting again.
A studio-built custom site, roughly AED 20,000 to 90,000. Designed for one company, written in code rather than assembled from blocks, built for speed, search and conversion, usually in English and Arabic, with the integrations a real business has: booking, CRM, payments, a content system the team edits. This is the band most of the work we publish sits in, and it is where the quotes vary most, because scope varies most.
Multi-market products, AED 100,000 and up. Headless storefronts across markets and currencies, web apps with accounts and dashboards, sites with heavy integration into ERP or operations. Here the website is a product and is priced as one.
The bands are in dirhams because that is how most Dubai quotes arrive; our own proposals are in US dollars because most of our clients are outside the UAE.
What moves a quote inside a band
Three things, in every case we have scoped.
How much there is. Pages and sections, languages, products. A bilingual site is not twice the work, but it is not the same work either: Arabic changes layout direction, typography and the length of every line, and the good agencies design for it rather than translate into it.
What it has to talk to. A booking calendar, a CRM, a payment gateway, WhatsApp, an inventory system. Each integration is a small project with its own edge cases, and each one you leave out of the brief appears later as a change request.
Who makes the content. Copy, photography and film are a large share of what makes a custom site look custom. A quote that assumes you will supply them is lower and, if you cannot, slower.
What a low number usually leaves out
Read a cheap quote for what is missing, because these are the lines that come back as invoices or as problems.
- Performance. A site that scores poorly on mobile costs you in search rankings and in every ad click that bounces. Ask for a target in numbers and for a live site of theirs that meets it.
- Search readiness. Titles, structured data, a sitemap, redirects from the old URLs. Without redirects, a redesign can lose the search equity the old site had built.
- Tracking. Analytics, conversion events, ad-platform tags, wired and tested. A site launched without them is a site you cannot improve.
- Ownership. The code in your repository, the accounts in your name. Cheap builds are sometimes cheap because you are renting them.
- The month after launch. Someone watching the numbers, the forms and the error logs while real users find what testing did not.
- Accessibility and legal pages. Contrast, keyboard use, screen readers, a privacy policy and cookie notice. Unglamorous, and expensive to retrofit.
Fixed price or hourly?
For a build, fixed price for a written scope. Hourly billing on a website rewards slowness and makes the final number unknowable until it is too late to change course. The trade is that you need a scope precise enough to price, which is what a good first call and a short audit produce. Retainers are the right shape for the work that continues after launch: campaigns, automations, the next feature, month to month with no long contract.
How we price, for the record
Projects start at $2,000, and we do not take on work below it, because below it a site cannot be built to the standard of the work we show. Everything above is quoted as a fixed price for a written scope, within a week of a free 30-minute call, with the launch checklist, the 30-day window after launch and a handover document always in the price. Marketing is a flat retainer, never a percentage of ad spend. The full rules are on our pricing page.
The question to ask any agency
"Show me a site you built that is like mine, tell me what it cost, and tell me what you would do differently now." The answer tells you whether they price from experience or from hope, and it tells you what you are actually buying: not a website, but a team's judgement about what yours needs.
