Ask five Dubai studios to quote the same brief and the spread will be enormous. The difference is almost never the design.
Why the same brief gets wildly different quotes
Three studios quoting AED 4,000, AED 25,000 and AED 90,000 for the same eight-page site are not selling the same thing, even though the proposals look similar.
The cheapest is usually a bought template with your logo dropped in, populated by someone who will not be reachable in six months. The most expensive may include research, content, photography, integrations and a year of support. The middle one is usually the honest version of the job.
The only way to compare is to make them quote against the same written scope, including the things nobody volunteers: how many rounds of revision, who writes the content, who owns the accounts.
What actually drives the number
- Page count, but less than you think. Ten templates covering forty pages costs less than twenty bespoke pages.
- Integrations. CRM, booking, payment, ERP. This is where timelines and budgets actually go.
- Content. If you write it, it is cheaper and slower. If we write it, it is faster and it is a real line on the quote.
- Bilingual. An Arabic version is not a translation, it is a second layout. Budget for it properly or postpone it deliberately.
- Ecommerce. A catalogue changes the job entirely, and the checkout is where the value is.
The cheap build that costs more
A template site at the bottom of the market typically needs replacing within eighteen to twenty-four months. It is slow because the template loads everything for every possible use case, it is hard to edit without breaking, and nobody documented it.
At that point you pay for a rebuild, plus the migration, plus whatever traffic was lost in between. The total exceeds what a proper build would have cost, and you lost two years.
This is not an argument for the most expensive quote. It is an argument for asking what happens in year two.
Questions that reveal the real price
- Who owns the domain, hosting and repository when we are finished?
- How many revision rounds are included, and what happens after?
- What is the load time target, and is it in the contract?
- Who writes the content, and is it in this number?
- What does maintenance cost after launch?
An honest studio has all five answers ready. Our own are on the about page and in the build spec.