A professionally built website from Zerak costs USD 34.95 a month, all in, with a 12-month minimum and no setup fee. That covers design, copywriting and structure — not a template — plus a dashboard you can edit the site from yourself, hosting, backups, security patches, uptime monitoring, small monthly changes, and search and social setup. If you are looking for affordable website design in Dubai, the number that matters is not the build fee. It is what the site costs you over three years, including the year nobody talks about in the quote.
The ownership terms, because that is always the first question: the site is yours outright after two years. If you want it sooner, you can take it at month 12 for a one-off USD 150. Your domain and your data are registered in your name from day one — not ours. You keep your content.
Prices are quoted in USD only. We do not publish an AED price list.
We work with businesses in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the wider Gulf and Egypt — remotely. Zerak has no office, address or trade licence in Dubai, and we say so on this page rather than let you find out later.
Start here: message us on WhatsApp or use the form at zerak.io/contact. The first step is a free half-hour call.
Why the AED 500 website is not the cheap option
A very low build price is only viable if the relationship ends at launch. That is the mechanic. Someone can build a five-page site for a small fee and make it work commercially — as long as they are not on the hook for anything afterwards.
Look at what sits outside that fee. Hosting renews every year. The domain renews at the registrar. The SSL certificate renews or the browser starts warning visitors away. Premium theme and plugin licences lapse, so the updates stop arriving. The host bumps the PHP version and something breaks. A theme update breaks the contact form and nobody notices for six weeks, because nobody is being paid to notice. Then, eventually, a rebuild.
This is not a hypothetical. In our study of 1,232 Gulf business websites — State of Gulf Business Websites 2026, published by Zerak in September 2026, sampling 2,399 businesses from Google Maps across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Jeddah, Doha and Kuwait City — 1 in 9 listed website links is broken, and about half of those are domains that no longer exist. The business paid for a site, the domain lapsed, and the link on their Google Maps listing now goes nowhere. The same study found 16% of working sites still show a copyright year of 2024 or older, 62% have no business schema markup, and 31% have no meta description.
That is the visible afterlife of an unmaintained build. Nobody sold those owners a bad website. They were sold a website with no custodian.
Speed tells the same story. On a random sample of 384 working sites measured with Google PageSpeed Insights for the same study, the median mobile performance score was 60/100, the median Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) was 6.1 seconds, and only 13% came in under Google's 2.5-second "good" threshold. LCP is one of the Core Web Vitals Google uses in ranking. A site that takes six seconds to show its main content on a phone is not a bargain, whatever it cost.
We will not tell you what any other agency or platform charges — we have no way to verify it and neither do you. Instead, here is how to read your own quote.
What actually drives the price of a website?
Five things move the number on a web design quote in the UAE. Market prices vary enormously, from a student rate to a six-figure enterprise build, and any "average" figure you read online is invented. Read your quote against these drivers instead.
Number of pages and how much of the writing you are doing
Cheap: you supply finished copy and images, and the build is five to eight pages on a defined structure. Expensive: the agency researches, writes and structures the content, or the site runs to dozens of pages with different templates. Copywriting is the line most often quietly excluded. Check whether yours includes it — with Zerak it does.
Whether it needs Arabic as well as English
This is the Gulf-specific driver most quotes ignore, and it is not a translation plugin. A proper Arabic version is a second set of written copy, a right-to-left layout that has been designed rather than mirrored, Arabic typography that actually reads well, and `hreflang` tags so Google serves the right version to the right searcher. It roughly doubles the content work.
It is also a real competitive gap. The same Zerak study found 51% of working Gulf business sites have no Arabic version at all — 70% in Dubai, against 26% in Riyadh. In a city where most of your competitors are English-only, an Arabic site is not a nice-to-have.
Whether it takes bookings, enquiries or payments
A brochure site is a form and an email. A booking site has availability, confirmations, reminders and a place to see what came in. A shop has products, stock, checkout, refunds and packing slips. Each step up is real engineering, and each step up is where a cheap quote tends to hand you a third-party embed and call it done.
Whether anything has to talk to a system you already run
Cheap: nothing. Expensive: your site has to push enquiries into a CRM, pull stock from a till, or sync bookings with a system your operations team already lives in. Integrations are where fixed quotes go wrong, because the other system's limitations are not visible until someone opens it.
Who maintains it after launch
Ask who hosts it, who patches it, who renews the SSL certificate, who holds the domain registrar login, and what a change costs in 2028. With Zerak all of that is inside the USD 34.95 a month — hosting, backups, security patches, uptime monitoring and small monthly changes. On most upfront quotes this line is simply blank.
Custom web apps and business systems work differently: they are scoped and quoted before anything starts, one fixed price for the build, no hourly billing. We do not publish a number for those because there isn't an honest one to publish. See Web Development Companies in Dubai: What They Charge, What You Own, and How Zerak Works Instead.
The three-year cost worksheet
Fill this in with your own figures. We have deliberately left the left-hand column blank — we are not going to invent an "average UAE agency" total, and you should distrust any page that does.
| Cost over 36 months | Your upfront quote | Zerak monthly plan |
|---|---|---|
| Build fee | AED ______ | USD 0 (no setup fee) |
| Hosting (annual × 3) | AED ______ | Included |
| Domain renewal (× 3) | AED ______ | Included, registered in your name |
| SSL certificate | AED ______ | Included |
| Premium theme / plugin licences (annual × 3) | AED ______ | Included |
| Change requests (your est. hours × their rate) | AED ______ | Small monthly changes included |
| Security or malware clean-up, if it happens | AED ______ | Included |
| Rebuild or redesign in year 3 | AED ______ | Not needed — kept current |
| 36-month total | AED ______ | USD 1,258.20 (34.95 × 36) |
Two things to note on the right-hand column. The site is yours outright from month 24, so months 25–36 are optional — you can stop paying and keep the site. And if you buy out at month 12 for USD 150, your first-year total is USD 569.40 and you own it.
The honest caveat: if the quote in front of you includes three years of hosting, maintenance, security patching and unlimited changes in writing, it may well be the better deal. Ask for that in writing before you sign. If it is not written down, it is not included.
Should you hire a freelance web designer in Dubai instead?
Often, yes. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
When a freelancer is the right call
A good freelance web designer in Dubai is usually cheaper for a one-off build, faster to brief, and easier to talk to than an agency account layer. If you have a clear idea of what you want, a fixed scope, and — this is the important part — someone internally who can handle hosting renewals, backups and updates afterwards, a freelancer is a sensible choice. Rates vary widely and depend on experience, so ask two or three for a written scope and compare what is in it, not just the total.
When the monthly plan is the right call
The risk with a freelance web developer in Dubai is not the quality of the work. It is that the engagement usually ends at launch. If they move to a full-time job, raise their rate, or simply stop replying, your site has no custodian. That is the failure mode our research measures at scale: one in nine business website links on Gulf Google Maps listings already broken, half of those domains gone entirely. Nobody planned that. It is just what happens when a site has no one responsible for it in year two.
The question to ask either way
Ask this of a freelancer, an agency, or us: "Who renews the hosting in 2028, and what does a change cost me then?" If the answer is not in writing, the price is not the price.
Our answer: hosting, backups, security patches, uptime monitoring and small monthly changes are inside the monthly fee, and every client gets a console to request changes and see bookings, enquiries and SEO results.
What is included, line by line
Website — USD 34.95/month
Design, copywriting and structure (not a template) · dashboard to edit the site yourself · hosting · backups · security patches · uptime monitoring · small monthly changes · search and social setup · 12-month minimum · no setup fee · USD 150 buyout at month 12 · yours outright at month 24.
Online shop — USD 32/month
All in, 12-month minimum, no setup fee. Products and photos set up for you · Arabic and English · phone-first checkout · orders, stock, refunds and packing slips · discount codes · reviews · abandoned-cart reminders · Instagram and Google product feed. See the demo shops at zerak.io/shops, including Maison Mirath for Gulf abaya brands.
Shop Plus — USD 59/month
Everything in Shop, plus an in-store till with receipts, branches with their own stock and pickup, gift cards and loyalty points, and digital products.
Payments. Cash on delivery is built in. For Egypt: Paymob cards and wallets, Fawry and InstaPay. For Gulf shops, payment options are agreed per shop — we will tell you exactly what is available for your market before you commit rather than list gateways we have not confirmed.
SEO, sold separately
SEO is bought at seo.zerak.io, not bundled into the website fee.
| Plan | Price | Core of it |
|---|---|---|
| SEO Monitor | USD 299/mo | 3-month minimum, USD 290 setup, 1 article/month |
| SEO Growth | USD 599/mo | USD 390 setup, 4 articles/month, Google Business Profile, 30 keywords |
| SEO Authority | USD 1,499/mo | USD 490 setup, 8 articles/month, 3–5 backlinks/month, Arabic and English, 60 keywords |
| AI Search Visibility | USD 390/mo | Weekly tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews |
Zerak website clients get 20% off every SEO plan. Every plan includes weekly AI search tracking — whether your business is named in AI answers, and who is named instead.
Web apps and business systems are scoped and quoted before anything starts: one fixed price for the build, no hourly billing.
Already have a website?
Two routes. We can take over the site you have — hosting, domain and access all moved into your name — and look after it from there. Or we rebuild it, keeping your content and your rankings, with old URLs redirected to the new pages so nothing you have earned in Google is thrown away.
For shops, we import products from Shopify, WooCommerce, Salla or Zid and redirect the old product links to the new ones, so existing traffic and any links pointing at individual products still land somewhere.
For a worked example, we rebuilt Best Egypt Holidays — a tour operator rebuilt from scratch on a new domain after its old site was hacked. Worth being precise about that one: the old domain and its rankings were not carried over. Our other case studies are Golden Gulf, a tourism and car rental business, Fit Oat, and Wieldy, our own agency management software.
How a project runs, and what you commit to
Four steps, every time:
- A free half-hour call. No scope, no charge, no obligation.
- A written fixed scope. What gets built, what it costs, when it lands — before anything starts.
- A live preview link from the first week. You watch it take shape rather than waiting for a reveal. We do not promise a delivery date in days or weeks at this stage; the written scope carries the dates.
- Domain and data in your name from day one, plus training on the dashboard so you can edit the site yourself.
What you commit to, stated plainly: a 12-month minimum on the monthly plan. After year one you can buy the site out for a one-off USD 150. At month 24 it is yours outright with nothing further to pay. Your domain and your content are yours throughout, at every stage, including if you leave.
Questions we get asked about price
Is there a setup fee?
No. The website plan is USD 34.95 a month, all in, with no setup fee, and the Shop and Shop Plus plans work the same way — first set-up is included. SEO plans bought at seo.zerak.io do carry a setup fee, listed per plan in the table above.
Do I own my website if I pay monthly for it?
Yes. Your domain and your data are registered in your name from day one, so you are never locked out. The site itself becomes yours outright at month 24, or you can take it at month 12 for a one-off USD 150. You keep your content either way.
What happens to my website if I stop paying?
Before month 12 the minimum term applies. After month 24 there is nothing to stop — the site is yours. At any point, your domain and content remain in your name, so moving to another host or developer is a transfer, not a rescue.
Do you have an office in Dubai?
No. Zerak works remotely with businesses in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the wider Gulf and Egypt. We have no office, address or trade licence in Dubai or anywhere in the GCC, and we would rather tell you that here than have you discover it after signing.
How much does it cost to add an Arabic version of my website?
Arabic is included in the Shop and Shop Plus plans. For websites it is part of the scope agreed on the free half-hour call, because a real Arabic site is a second set of copy, a right-to-left design and hreflang tags rather than a plugin. It is worth doing: 51% of working Gulf business sites have no Arabic version at all, rising to 70% in Dubai (State of Gulf Business Websites 2026, Zerak, September 2026).
Do you take payment in AED?
Prices are quoted in USD only — USD 34.95 a month for a website, USD 32 for a shop, USD 59 for Shop Plus. We do not publish an AED price list, and we would rather show one honest number than a converted figure that drifts with the rate.
Will a rebuild lose my Google rankings?
Not if the old URLs are redirected to their new equivalents and the content is carried across. That is standard practice on every rebuild we do, including product URLs when we import a shop from Shopify, WooCommerce, Salla or Zid. Rankings are at risk when a rebuild launches on a new domain or discards pages without redirecting them.
Is SEO included in the website plan?
No. SEO is sold separately at seo.zerak.io, starting at USD 299 a month for SEO Monitor. The website plan includes search and social setup — clean structure, schema markup, meta descriptions, a site Google can read — which is the foundation, not a campaign. Website clients get 20% off every SEO plan.
Start with the free half-hour call
Message us on WhatsApp, use the form at zerak.io/contact, or email hello@zerak.io. Bring the quote you have been given — we will go through it with you against the five cost drivers above, whether or not you end up working with us.
Not ready to talk? Run the free website audit at seo.zerak.io and see where your current site stands on speed, structure and search.
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Written by Ed Kamel, founder of Zerak and Wieldy. Zerak builds websites, online shops, web apps and business systems and does SEO in Arabic and English for businesses across the Gulf and Egypt. Wieldy (wieldyapp.com) is our agency management software.