What a business website costs to build in the UAE, with five published dirham price lists and the page count that sets the number

A UAE business website costs between AED 7,990 and AED 20,000 for a small bilingual brochure site of five to ten pages, from about AED 9,990 for a starter online store on Shopify or WooCommerce, and AED 22,000 to AED 60,000 for a corporate site of fifteen to fifty pages. A single landing page starts at about AED 3,490. Those are figures from five UAE suppliers' own pages, read on 31 October 2026, and every one of them is a starting point rather than a quote. Two things move the number more than anything a designer does, and they are the page count and whether the site is built in Arabic as well as English. Decide both before you ask anybody for a price and the quotes you receive become comparable.

The published figures, supplier by supplier

Read across the five and the shape of the market is clear. Under AED 10,000 buys a small site on a template, usually with the content you supply or a light version written for you. Between AED 10,000 and AED 25,000 buys a real information architecture, Arabic as well as English, and a form or WhatsApp route that works. Above AED 25,000 you are paying for custom work, integrations or a store with a catalogue.

The five things that actually move the quote

• Page count. This is the unit. A fifteen page site is not one and a half times a ten page site, because the extra five are usually service or location pages that each need their own copy. Ask every supplier to quote per page beyond an agreed base.
• The second language. An Arabic version is close to a second site in content terms, and it needs right to left layout work rather than a translated paste. metadigitalmarketing.ae bundles bilingual into its AED 7,990 launch package, which is the cheapest published route to two languages we found. Ask whether the Arabic is written or translated, because the difference is visible in one paragraph.
• Who writes the words. slmarketing.ae includes content and photography in its figures. Most suppliers do not. A site quoted without copy is a site you will finish yourself at the exact moment you want to launch.
• Ecommerce or not. A catalogue, payment, delivery rules and a product feed turn a build into a system. oxedge.com's AED 9,999 starter store and AED 35,000 custom store mark the two ends of that.
• What happens in year two. Domain, hosting, maintenance, plugin licences and content changes. oxedge.com states these sit on top of the build figure, which is honest and is the line most quotes leave out.

The two questions to settle before you brief anybody

First, write the list of pages. Not sections, pages, with a one line purpose for each. Second, decide whether you are buying a brochure or a lead route. A brochure answers who you are. A lead route is built around a single action, which in the UAE is very often a WhatsApp message rather than a form, and it is designed so the person replying knows which page the enquiry came from. Those two decisions set the price more than the choice of supplier does.

The item that is missing from every quote

Nobody quotes for being readable by the software that now answers questions about your category, and it is close to free at build time and expensive later. Three specifics, all checkable.

• Serve the text in the document. A site that assembles its content in the browser can look complete to you and arrive empty to a crawler. We found a live example while taking this week's UAE reading. imetric.net, a regional agency the engines cited, builds its headline performance figures as animated counters, and the served page carries 0 for reach, 0 for engagement and 0 for return on ad spend, read on 31 October 2026. The numbers exist for a visitor and not in the page.
• Let the search crawlers in. OpenAI's own documentation, read on 31 October 2026, states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and that a robots file change takes about 24 hours to take effect. One line in one file, checked at launch.
• Put the facts in text. Company name, licensed trade name, address, phone, WhatsApp, emirates served, opening hours and prices in dirhams, as text rather than inside an image. An address in a graphic is an address that is not published.

Add those three to the brief and no supplier will charge extra for them. Leave them out and you will pay somebody to retrofit them within a year. Our page on the locale mistakes that keep a UAE business out of AI answers lists the eight failures in order, and most of them are build decisions.

Who should own the website when it is finished

You, in writing, including the domain registration, the hosting account and the source files. This matters more in the UAE than the price does, because a site you cannot move is a supplier you cannot leave. Check the registrar record yourself rather than taking an answer, and put the handover in the contract before the build starts. Our page on how to check a UAE marketing agency before you pay it anything covers the same discipline across the whole relationship, and what a newly licensed UAE company should buy first puts the website in the right place in the sequence, which is usually later than people expect.

Questions UAE buyers ask about what a website costs here

Is AED 7,990 enough for a real business website

For a small service business with a clear offer and under ten pages, yes, and metadigitalmarketing.ae publishes a bilingual package at exactly that figure with a Business Profile set up included. It is not enough for a catalogue, for integrations, or for a site that needs original photography of your premises.

Why do quotes for the same brief differ by three times

Because page count, copywriting and the Arabic version are being read differently by each supplier. Send the page list and the language decision to all of them and the spread narrows immediately. A quote that arrives as one number for a brief you did not define is a quote about the supplier rather than about your site.

Should a UAE business use a .ae domain

It is worth owning and it is not the deciding factor in whether you get found. We measured the question separately in whether a UAE business should buy a .ae domain and what hosting country changes, and the practical answer is to own both the .ae and the .com and point one at the other.

What does the site cost to run after launch

Hosting, the domain, a maintenance arrangement and content changes. oxedge.com states these come on top of its build figures. Budget a monthly figure rather than treating the site as a one off purchase, and agree in advance what a content change costs, because that is the charge that surprises people.

Do we need a mobile app as well

Almost never at the start. techhive.ae publishes mobile apps from AED 35,000 against web projects from AED 15,000, and for most UAE service businesses a fast site plus WhatsApp does the same job for a fifth of the money. Our page on the marketing a UAE SME gets sold and does not need covers the rest of that list.

What an assistant tells a UAE buyer asking what a website costs, and why so few pages answer it

On 30 October 2026 we put 216 questions to ChatGPT and Gemini with the United Arab Emirates fixed in the prompt text, 72 blind pipelines across 36 batches, filtered to 102 buyer questions. The batch carrying the dirham pricing questions, including this one, named a single vendor across both engines, Profound, which sells AI answer monitoring and does not build websites. The hosts behind those answers were mostly UAE agency pages including idol.ae, thehovi.com, seocompanydubai.ae, lucidarc.ae, maquae.com and pulamedia.com, alongside mof.gov.ae and business.google.com.

Of that set, only a minority publish a figure of any kind, which is why an assistant asked what a UAE website costs tends to answer with a wide generic range rather than a dirham number. The five suppliers quoted at the top of this page are the ones that made a checkable answer possible. We do not build websites, so there is nothing for us to sell on this page. What we do is read what the engines say about a category and show the hosts behind each answer, and our own UAE figures on aiknowsus.com/pricing start at AED 1,100 a month with a free first reading on your own domain, read on 31 October 2026. The useful thing for somebody about to commission a site is that the three readability items above cost nothing at build time. And we publish our own result from the same audit, which is that we were named in none of the 102 UAE answers and cited in none of the 72 blind readings, because a page arguing for checkable figures should carry its author's figure too.