What a business website actually costs in the UAE (2026, with real numbers)

The standard argument for hiding prices is that every project is different. That is true, and it is not a reason. A restaurant menu does not stop existing because some diners order the tasting menu. Published starting prices with clear tiers tell you the shape of the market; the conversation then decides where inside it you land.

The real effect of opaque pricing is that you cannot compare. Three agencies give you three proposals with different scopes, different assumptions, and no common unit — so the decision quietly becomes about who presented best, not who delivers most. Businesses routinely overpay two to three times for the same deliverable simply because there was no reference point.

It also wastes your time. If a studio’s entry point is AED 40,000 and your budget is AED 6,000, both of you would rather know that in ten seconds on a web page than after two meetings.

Four things move the price more than anything else. First, scope: how many pages, and how much of the design is genuinely custom rather than a theme with your logo dropped in. Second, language: whether the site is properly bilingual — Arabic and English both authored, both laid out correctly — or English with a translation plugin bolted on.

Third, functionality. A brochure site that presents information sits at the bottom of the range. The moment the site has to *do* something — take bookings, process payments, hold customer accounts, sync with an inventory or accounting system — you are commissioning software, and it is priced as software.

Fourth, who is accountable afterwards. A quote that ends at launch is cheaper than one that includes hosting, email, updates, and someone answering the phone when something breaks at 9pm. Both are legitimate; they are not the same product, and they should never be compared on price alone.

Under AED 1,500 — a template. Usually a purchased theme with your text pasted in, hosted somewhere shared and slow, with Arabic run through machine translation if it exists at all. It will not rank, and in our experience it gets rebuilt within a year, which makes it the most expensive option on this list.

AED 3,000–6,000 — a proper small-business website. A handful of pages, fast, genuinely bilingual, structured so Google can index it, with a working contact form. This is the right band for most clinics, law firms, professional services, and new businesses.

AED 5,000–9,000 — the same, bundled with professional email on your own domain and managed hosting. The practical difference is ownership: you hold the whole presence rather than a design sitting on infrastructure somebody else controls.

AED 8,000–15,000 — e-commerce. A bilingual store with payments, inventory, and order handling. The jump over a brochure site is not design, it is the transactional machinery behind it and the testing that machinery demands.

AED 10,000–20,000 — website plus a native mobile app sharing one backend. For businesses whose customers need bookings, accounts, or notifications in their pocket.

AED 25,000+ — custom platforms and internal systems: marketplaces, member portals, multi-tenant SaaS, or ERP/CRM/POS built to run an operation rather than advertise one. Priced by complexity, integrations, and how much of your business logic has to be modelled.

These are the numbers on our own service pages. All are starting prices, excluding VAT, and all are published rather than quoted on request.

Websites: business website from AED 3,000 · website with email and hosting from AED 5,000 · e-commerce store from AED 8,000.

Apps and software: cross-platform mobile app from AED 10,000 · full product build from AED 20,000 · custom software from AED 25,000 · ERP, CRM or POS from AED 25,000.

Content: SEO article from AED 250 · full website copy from AED 1,500 · localisation from AED 0.35 per word.

Marketing, monthly: ads management from AED 1,500/mo · SEO from AED 2,000/mo · full growth retainer from AED 4,000/mo.

Where a project genuinely exceeds these — an enterprise platform, an unusual integration — we say so before you commit, with the reason. What we do not do is start from what your company appears able to pay.

This is the single most misquoted item in the UAE market. Many proposals price Arabic as an add-on — a percentage on top, or a per-page translation fee. That pricing reveals the method: the site is built in English, then the text is sent out, then the Arabic is poured back into a layout that was never designed to hold it.

What you get is a site where the Arabic reads like a translation because it is one, where the right-to-left layout breaks in the places nobody checked, and where the Arabic typography is whatever the English font happened to fall back to. Arabic-speaking visitors notice within one paragraph, and the page loses them.

Doing it properly means the layout is mirrored by design, the Arabic typeface is chosen and self-hosted deliberately, and the copy is written natively in Arabic rather than converted from English. That costs more at the build stage than a translation pass and less than rebuilding in eighteen months, which is the usual sequence.

When you compare quotes, find where Arabic sits. If it appears as a line item with a per-word rate, you are being quoted a translation, not a bilingual site.

A website is not a one-off purchase, and a quote that implies otherwise is incomplete. The recurring items are small individually and worth knowing in advance.

Domain registration runs roughly AED 40–150 a year depending on the extension. Hosting for a fast static site is minimal; for a database-driven store it is meaningfully more. Professional email on your domain is a small per-mailbox monthly cost. An SSL certificate should be free and automatic — if anyone charges you for one, ask why.

Then the ones that actually decide whether the site earns anything: content, and someone maintaining it. A site that is never updated stops ranking. This is where the monthly marketing retainers above come in, and it is entirely reasonable to defer them — but budget for the fact that a launched site is a starting point, not a finished asset.

Ask every agency for the full first-year cost, not the build price. The gap between those two numbers is where unpleasant surprises live.

The AED 800 site is not a smaller version of the AED 5,000 site. It is a different thing that resembles it in a screenshot. It is typically slow, which costs you visitors before they read a word; generic, which costs you the trust a considered design earns; and invisible to search, which is the point of having it.

The pattern we see repeatedly: a business buys the cheap site, gets no enquiries from it for a year, concludes that “websites don’t work for our industry,” and then rebuilds properly anyway. The total spend is higher than building it right once, and a year of compounding search history was lost.

None of which is an argument for the most expensive quote. It is an argument for asking what specifically the difference buys — speed, real Arabic, indexability, accountability after launch. If a higher quote cannot answer that in concrete terms, it is not better, just dearer.

Ask all three the same seven questions, in writing, and compare the answers rather than the totals.

One: what is the total first-year cost, including domain, hosting, email, and any licences? Two: is the Arabic written natively or translated, and who writes it? Three: will the right-to-left layout be designed or auto-flipped — and can I see an Arabic page you have built?

Four: what page-speed target are you committing to, and will you show me the score after launch? Five: what exactly is delivered for SEO — is structured data, hreflang, and a sitemap included, or is that a separate engagement? Six: who owns the domain, hosting account, and source code when we are finished?

Seven: what happens after launch — what is covered, for how long, and what does a change request cost? A studio that answers all seven plainly is showing you how it will behave when something goes wrong, which is the thing you are actually buying.

In the interest of the transparency this article argues for: the rate card above is our own published 2026 pricing, taken directly from our service pages — you can verify every figure on this site.

The wider price bands come from two places: the projects we have delivered across the UAE, and the competing proposals clients show us during a pitch. That is a real but partial view of the market, and we would rather say so than dress it up as a formal industry survey.

What it is not is a scrape of published competitor pricing, for the reason this article opened with — most UAE agencies do not publish any. If that changes, this page will be updated. It carries the date of its last revision at the top.