What a website costs in Dubai

Why there is no price list on this page

Two projects described with the same three words — "a company website" — routinely differ by an order of magnitude, and the difference is never the design. It is the number of distinct page types, whether the content exists yet, whether it has to work in Arabic as well as English, and what it has to talk to. A published range that ignores all four would be a number you could not rely on, and you would find that out in the first meeting.

So this page explains what actually moves the figure. If you want the figure itself, the last section says exactly what to send; a written scope and a price come back before anything is built.

What you are actually paying for

Most of the cost of a website is not the visual design. In a typical project the larger shares are:

• Distinct page types — not pages. Forty product pages built from one template cost far less than four pages that each need their own layout.
• Content — writing it, editing it, or moving it from an old site. Migration is rarely a copy and paste: headings, images and links all have to survive.
• Integration — payment, delivery, a CRM, an ERP, a booking system, an existing customer database. This is the item most often left out of a comparison quote and most often the reason a project overruns.
• The second language — see below. It is not a translation line item.
• Testing across real devices, accessibility, and the work that makes a page load quickly on a phone on mobile data.

What a second language really adds

An Arabic version is not the English site with the words replaced. The layout mirrors, so every asymmetric component is built twice and checked twice. Typography changes: the Arabic face is a separate file and needs its own size and line height to be comfortable. Search has to match text people actually type. Every form, error message, invoice and automated email exists in both. Content has to be written in Arabic, not machine-translated, or it reads as machine-translated — and a Gulf reader can tell.

It is worth saying plainly because it is the single item most underestimated in quotes for this market. Design and development both carry it.

What pushes the number down

• Ready content. Text and photography that exist and are signed off remove a whole phase.
• Fewer templates. Deciding that two sections can share a layout is usually invisible to visitors and material to the budget.
• A platform rather than a build. For many businesses WordPress or a hosted store does the job; a custom build should be a decision, not a default.
• Phasing. Launch what earns first and add the rest once it is earning.
• One decision-maker. The cost of a project tracks the number of people who can reopen a settled question.

What pushes it up

• Anything that has to exchange data with a system you already run.
• Accounts, logins and anything holding personal data — which brings obligations about where that data sits and who can see it.
• Bespoke motion, illustration or photography.
• Migrating a large old site while keeping its search rankings, which means mapping every URL rather than redirecting them all to the home page.
• A fixed launch date tied to an event.

What recurs, and what does not

The build is once. These are not:

• Domain and hosting, yearly. See hosting.
• Licences for a theme, a plugin, a font or a third-party service — small individually and worth listing before launch rather than discovering later.
• Maintenance: updates, backups, monitoring and the security work that stops a site being defaced. See website security.
• Content and marketing, if you want the site to grow rather than sit still. Digital marketing is a monthly commitment, not a project.

A quote that covers only the build and is silent on the rest is not cheaper. It is less complete.

How to get a real number, quickly

Send whatever you have — it does not need to be a brief:

• Your current site, if there is one, and what is wrong with it.
• Roughly how many distinct kinds of page you need, and one example of each.
• Whether it is bilingual.
• Anything it has to connect to.
• Whether the content exists.
• Any date that is genuinely fixed.

That is enough to answer with a written scope and a price. If the honest answer is that you need something smaller than you asked for, you will get that instead. Tell us what you are building.

Questions we are asked before the first meeting

How much does a website cost in Dubai?

Anywhere from the price of a small template build to the price of a small car, and the spread is not agency mark-up — it is scope. A five-page brochure site with content ready is a different project from a bilingual site with a product catalogue and a booking system wired into an existing database, even though both get called "a website". The sections above are the honest version of the answer: they name what actually moves the figure so you can place your own project on that scale before anyone quotes.

Why won't you publish a price list?

Because a published number for "a company website" would be wrong for most of the people reading it, in both directions. It would either undercut what your project needs — and become an argument later — or overprice a simple job and send you away for no reason. We publish prices where they are honest to publish: hosting has three plans with the price on the page, because hosting is a defined product.

Do you charge by the hour or by the project?

Build work is quoted against a written scope, so you know the figure before anything starts and it does not move unless the scope does. Ongoing work — maintenance, marketing, content — is monthly, because it is a commitment rather than a deliverable. If a piece of work genuinely cannot be scoped in advance, we say so rather than quoting a number we would have to revisit.

Can I build it in stages?

Usually yes, and often you should. Launching the part that earns — the pages that sell, the form that converts — and adding the rest once it is running spreads the cost and tells you something real before you commit the rest of the budget. It is worth deciding the stages at the start: retrofitting a phase boundary later costs more than planning one.

What will it cost me every year after launch?

Domain and hosting, licences for anything third-party, and maintenance. Those are small and predictable, and we list them before launch rather than after. Marketing is the item that is not small, and it is optional in a way the others are not.

Is a cheaper website a false economy?

Not automatically. A small business with ready content and no integrations is well served by a platform build, and paying for a custom one would be waste. It becomes a false economy when the cheap quote is cheap because it left something out — content, the second language, the integration, the migration of an old site's URLs — and those arrive later as extras. Compare what is in two quotes before comparing the numbers.

We have a fixed budget. Is that a problem?

No, it is the most useful thing you can tell us. A budget is a constraint to design against, and knowing it early means the conversation is about what fits rather than about what to cut. If it genuinely will not cover what you have described, you will hear that in the first reply rather than three meetings in.