The ranges, and where they come from
Dubai agencies do publish their numbers, and they cluster closely enough to be useful. These are the ranges quoted by Element8 in their 2026 guide, which match what we see elsewhere in the market:
| Type of site | Typical range | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Basic / brochure | AED 3,500 – 8,000 | Three to five pages, template design |
| Corporate / SME | AED 12,000 – 55,000 | 10–20 pages, blog, careers, often English and Arabic |
| E-commerce | AED 15,000 – 110,000+ | Inventory, payment gateways, delivery integration |
| Custom web application | AED 50,000 – 275,000+ | User roles, ERP or CRM integration, bespoke workflow |
One caveat worth stating plainly: almost every published price guide in Dubai is written by an agency that wants the enquiry, so the ranges skew towards the top. Read them as the ceiling of normal rather than the middle.
What actually moves the number
The page count barely matters. Five things genuinely drive the price:
- Integrations. Every system your site has to talk to — CRM, ERP, payment gateway, inventory, a booking engine — is a project in itself. One integration can cost more than the rest of the site.
- Arabic. A bilingual build is not a translation. Right-to-left layout has to be designed and tested separately, and it reliably adds 30–50% to design and front-end work. Decide this before you brief anyone, because retrofitting it costs far more.
- Custom design versus template. A template is cheaper and faster and will look like other sites. Bespoke design costs more and is worth it when the site is the first thing a serious buyer sees.
- Who writes the content. The most common cause of a late website in Dubai is not development. It is that nobody wrote the copy. If you want the agency to write it, that is a real line item.
- Compliance. If you handle personal data at any scale, UAE PDPL obligations, a proper privacy policy and in some cases penetration testing are part of the cost, not an extra.
The costs that are left out of most quotes
The build price is not the cost of owning a website. Budget for these separately, because a quote that omits them is not cheaper, just less complete:
- Hosting — from a few hundred dirhams a year for a small site to several thousand for anything with traffic or an application behind it.
- The domain — small, but it must be registered in your company's name, not the agency's.
- Maintenance — updates, security patches, backups. Industry convention is 15–25% of the build cost per year, and it is not optional: an unpatched CMS is how most small-business sites get defaced.
- Content updates — free if the site was built so your team can edit it, a recurring invoice if it was not. Ask which you are buying.
Five questions to ask before you compare two quotes
Two Dubai quotes for "a website" can differ by a factor of five and both be honest. These five questions make them comparable:
- Who owns the code and the hosting account? If the answer is the agency, you are renting, and the price of leaving is unknown. It should be your repository, your hosting, your domain.
- Is the content included, and who writes it? This is the most common hidden gap between two quotes.
- Can my team edit the site afterwards without paying you? If not, add a monthly fee to their number before comparing.
- What happens after launch, and what does it cost? Get the maintenance figure in writing up front, not in month four.
- What is the fixed price and the fixed date? An hourly estimate is not a price. If neither is fixed, the number you were given is a marketing figure.
How we price it
We quote a twenty-eight day cycle rather than publishing a rate card, because what a site has to do varies far more than how many pages it has. A straightforward business website is usually one cycle. E-commerce with stock and payment integration, or a web application with accounts and workflow, is typically two or three.
You get the number for the whole cycle before any work starts, and it does not move unless you change the scope. The code, the repositories, the hosting and the domain are yours from the first day. If you want to know what your particular site would take, send us the brief — or just the problem with the current one.