How much does a website cost in Dubai? An honest guide for 2026

Ask five studios in Dubai for a quote on "a website" and the numbers will land anywhere between a few thousand dirhams and well over a hundred thousand. None of them are lying. They are answering different questions, and until the question is pinned down the number means very little. This is the guide we send people who ask us before they have a scope.

A note on where the figures come from: the bands below are what we see in 2026, in the proposals clients share with us when they compare studios and in our own quotes. They are a map of the market as we observe it, not a published rate card, and a specific project can fall outside them for good reasons.

The four price bands you will see

• Template site, roughly AED 2,000 to 8,000. A WordPress theme or a site builder, five to eight pages, your text and photos dropped into a layout somebody else designed. It exists, it is fast to make, and it looks like the other sites built on the same theme. Right for a new trade licence that needs a presence this month.
• Designed business site, roughly AED 12,000 to 40,000. Custom design, eight to twenty pages, a content management system you can edit, proper search setup, performance tuned to pass Core Web Vitals, and usually the option of Arabic. Most established SMEs in the UAE belong here, and so do most of the sites we build.
• Online shop, roughly AED 15,000 to 120,000. Everything above plus a catalogue, a payment gateway that works with UAE banks, shipping rules, VAT-compliant invoices, customer accounts, and the back office that keeps the shop running after launch. The range is wide because "a shop" can mean forty products or four thousand.
• Custom platform, AED 80,000 upwards. Booking systems, client portals, marketplaces, anything that integrates with an ERP or a third-party system, anything with logins and roles. At this level the website is software, and it is priced like software.

What actually moves the number

Within a band, six things explain most of the difference between one quote and the next.

Design from scratch or from a template. Original design costs more because it is drawn for your content, your audience and your brand rather than adapted from a theme. It also removes the "we look like our competitor" problem, which for a Dubai brand competing on trust is not a small thing.

Unique page templates, not page count. Forty product pages that share one layout are one template. A home page, an about page, a service page and a contact page are four. Studios count templates because that is where the design and build time goes; clients count pages, and the two conversations often talk past each other.

Who produces the content. Text, photography, translation. This is the most underestimated line in any web project and the most common reason a launch slips by two months. A site is rarely late because the code is late; it is late because the copy for the services page never arrived. Budget for it, or have the studio budget for it.

Arabic. A bilingual site is not twice the price, but it is not free. Right-to-left layouts have to be designed rather than mirrored, the Arabic copy has to be written by someone who writes Arabic rather than pushed through a translation tool, and every future edit happens twice. In our own quotes the Arabic version adds somewhere between a quarter and 40 percent to the English build.

Integrations. Payment gateways, a CRM, WhatsApp, booking calendars, maps, live chat, newsletter tools. Each one is a day or three of work and an account to maintain. A brochure site with none of them is genuinely simpler than a brochure site with five.

Who is in the room. A large agency with a Downtown office, account managers and a sales team has to charge for that structure. A studio like ours charges for the designers and engineers who do the work. A freelancer charges for one person's time. The finished website can look the same from all three; the difference is in what happens when something breaks at nine in the evening before your launch, and you should ask that question directly.

The costs after launch

The build is the number people ask about. The running costs are the number they forget, and they are why a site that was "finished" in 2022 is slow, unpatched and showing an expired certificate in 2026.

• Domain. A .ae domain is registered through one of the registrars accredited by the UAE's Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority, and anyone can register a second-level .ae name; the registrars set their own prices, and a .ae generally costs more per year than a .com (TDRA, .ae FAQ). Whatever it costs, keep the registration in your own name and your own account, not the agency's.
• Hosting. Shared hosting from a few hundred dirhams a year; a managed server or cloud plan from roughly AED 1,500 to 6,000 a year for a business site; more for a shop with real traffic. Cheap hosting is the usual reason a well-built site tests badly.
• Maintenance. Updates, backups, security patches, small content changes, uptime monitoring. Retainers in Dubai run from a few hundred dirhams a month for updates and backups to AED 3,000 and above where editing and content are included. A site with no maintenance plan is a site with no backup the day it is hacked.
• The things that are free. TLS certificates have been free since Let's Encrypt made them so, and Cloudflare issues them at no cost as well. Basic analytics, Google Search Console and a business email through a workspace you already pay for cost nothing extra. If a quote charges separately for "SSL", ask why.

What "fast enough" means, in numbers

"Performance" in a quote should mean something measurable. Google's Core Web Vitals are the public yardstick: a page should show its largest content within 2.5 seconds, respond to interaction within 200 milliseconds, and keep layout shift below 0.1, measured for real visitors (web.dev, Core Web Vitals). Ask a studio to show you those numbers on sites they have already shipped. A portfolio that looks beautiful and fails all three is telling you what the finished product will do.

What a fair quote looks like

A quote that is worth comparing has line items. It names the page templates. It says who writes the text, who takes the photographs and who translates. It states how many revision rounds are included, what the timeline is, and what the hosting terms are after launch. It says, in writing, that you own the domain, the code and the content. If any of that is missing, the low number is low because those things are not in it.

The questions that tell you which band you need

• Do people need to buy, book or log in on the site, or read and then call you?
• Do you have the text and photographs, or does someone need to make them?
• Does the site need Arabic on day one?
• Which systems does it need to talk to: a CRM, a booking tool, a payment provider, an ERP?
• Who will edit it after launch, and how often?
• What does the site have to do in the first year to have paid for itself?

Answer those six honestly and you can place yourself in a band before you speak to anyone. We quote from a written scope; our business sites land in the second band and our shops in the third. If a scope belongs in the first band we will say so and point you at a template, because a good template is a better result than a bad custom build.

Sources

• TDRA, .aeDA frequently asked questions: who can register a .ae name and that registration goes through accredited registrars.
• Let's Encrypt: free, automated TLS certificates.
• web.dev, Core Web Vitals: the three metrics and their thresholds.
• The price bands, the Arabic uplift and the maintenance ranges are our own observations from proposals shared with us and from our quotes in 2026, not a published survey.