What a website should cost in the UAE — and why quotes differ by 10×
Three companies quote you AED 2,000, AED 15,000 and AED 60,000 for “a website.” None of them is necessarily lying. They are quoting three different products that happen to share a name.
The three products hiding behind one word
The template install. A ready-made theme with your logo and text dropped in. A few days of work, and priced like it. This is fine when you need an online business card and nothing more. The catch: your site looks like every other business that bought the same theme, it usually ships slow, and “small changes” later fight the template instead of working with it.
The custom build. Someone designs your pages for your customer, then builds them. The money buys thinking, not just typing: what goes on the homepage and why, what a visitor should do next, how it reads on a phone in the sun. This is the band where a website starts paying for itself.
The platform. Bookings, payments, member areas, dashboards. You are no longer buying a website — you are buying software. Prices here are driven by scope, which is why any serious quote at this level comes after a scoping conversation, never before.
Why the same product still varies
- Who does the work. A freelancer, a small studio and a 50-person agency have very different overheads — and the agency’s overhead is in your quote.
- What is included after launch. Hosting, fixes, updates — included for a month? A year? Never? Two identical quotes can be thousands apart on this alone.
- Content. If you supply finished text and photos, you pay less. If the vendor has to write and shoot, you pay for that work — and you should, because “we’ll just copy something” is how sites end up saying nothing.
Questions that expose a bad quote
- “Is the price fixed, in writing?” If the answer is hourly with no cap, the real price is unknown — including to them.
- “Whose name is the domain registered in?” The only acceptable answer is yours. Anything else is a leash.
- “Can I see it on my phone before launch?” If mobile is an afterthought in the demo, it is an afterthought in the build.
- “What exactly happens after launch?” Vague answers here become invoices later.
The honest summary
Cheap is not a scam and expensive is not a guarantee. The scam is a mismatch: template-install prices attached to custom-build promises. Decide which of the three products your business actually needs, then compare quotes for that product only — and get the scope in writing before anyone starts.
Ask us what your project should cost — we will tell you even if the answer is “less than you expected.”