Ask five studios what a website costs and you will get five versions of the same non-answer: it depends on scope. That is true, and it is useless. It leaves you comparing a 9,000 AED quote against a 90,000 AED quote with no idea whether you are looking at the same job priced differently or two completely different jobs.
The problem is not that studios are cagey. It is that most of them price in the wrong unit.
The hour is a broken unit
Hourly billing feels fair. You pay for time spent, the studio gets paid for work done, and a timesheet settles any argument. It fails in three specific ways, and all three cost you money.
You cannot compare two quotes. One studio's 40 hours at 300 AED is another's 90 hours at 130 AED. Same total, wildly different teams, and neither number tells you what you actually get at the end. The unit describes the studio's internal effort, not your outcome.
It punishes the studio for getting better. This is the part that quietly distorts the whole market. If a team invests years in a component library, a deployment pipeline and a tested performance budget, the same build takes them a third of the time it took three years ago. Billing hourly, they invoice a third as much for identical work. Every efficiency gain becomes a pay cut. The rational response — and you can see it across the industry — is to stop getting faster, or to stop admitting it.
It makes small projects impossible. Quoting is not free. A serious estimate means a discovery call, a scope document, a technical review and a written proposal. That fixed cost is roughly the same whether the job is 5,000 AED or 100,000. On a small project it can exceed the margin, so studios do the only sensible thing and decline. Not because your project is beneath them — because the paperwork costs more than the work.
Which is how a founder with a real business and a modest budget ends up with two options: a template on a marketplace, or nothing.
What we publish, and what it means
We publish our engagement prices. Not "starting from", not "contact us" — actual figures on the Services & Pricing page. A few of them, so you can see the shape:
- 18,000 AED — Presence: a premium WordPress site, up to five pages, custom-designed, with lead capture and on-page SEO.
- 33,000 AED — Signature Build: a hand-coded front end on React or Next.js, motion, CMS, built to Core Web Vitals.
- 40,000 AED — Signature Moment: one unforgettable WebGL scene on an otherwise clean site. Three to eight weeks.
- 90,000 AED — Immersive Brand Site: multiple scenes, custom shaders, asset streaming, bilingual English and Arabic.
Two of those numbers are worth sitting with. A hand-coded custom site starts at 33,000 AED. A single 3D moment costs 40,000 and takes up to two months. Those are not padded figures — they are what the work takes when it is done properly, and we would rather print them than perform a discovery call to arrive at the same place.
Publishing them has one obvious consequence: anyone whose budget is a fifth of the lowest number can see that immediately, on their own, without booking a call to be let down. We think that is a feature. Your time is worth something too.
Price the parts, not the time
The fix for the hourly unit is not "value-based pricing" as a slogan. It is being specific about components.
A website is not an indivisible lump. It is a set of decisions that each carry a cost: how many pages, whether the interface is designed from scratch or assembled from a system, whether anything needs a login and a database, whether content is written or supplied, whether it ships in one language or two, whether motion is a hover state or a rendered scene.
Priced as components, two useful things happen at once. A large project still costs what a large project costs, because it genuinely contains more parts. And a small project becomes possible to quote, because "one page, header and footer, no backend, no custom interface design" is a description precise enough to put a number against without a week of discovery.
That precision is the whole trick. The reason studios can't quote small jobs isn't the size — it's the ambiguity. Remove the ambiguity and the fixed cost of quoting collapses.
Why a floor still exists — and why you want one
There is a number below which we will not take custom work. Ours is 18,350 AED, about 5,000 US dollars, and it is on the pricing page next to everything else.
A floor sounds like it exists to protect the studio. It mostly protects you. Below a certain budget, the only way to deliver is to cut the things that don't show up in a screenshot: testing across real devices, a performance budget, accessible markup, analytics that actually work, a handover you can maintain without us. You get something that looks finished and behaves like a prototype. The studio that quotes under its own floor is not being generous — it is deciding, quietly, what to leave out.
What a floor should never be is a wall with nothing on the other side. "Our minimum is X, goodbye" is a bad answer to a founder who wants to test a studio before handing over a flagship. The honest version is a smaller, clearly-bounded engagement that is described as exactly what it is — a defined piece of work, not a discounted version of the big one — with a scope written down and a price that still covers doing it properly.
Seven questions that make any quote comparable
You do not need a studio to publish its prices to buy well. You need answers to these, in writing, from everyone you are considering. Ask them in this order.
- What exactly am I getting, counted? Number of unique page designs, number of templates, number of content types. "A website" is not a deliverable.
- Is the interface designed for me, or assembled from a system? Both are legitimate and they cost very different amounts. You just need to know which one you are buying.
- Who writes the content, and is that in the price? The single most common reason projects stall for months is that nobody agreed who was writing the words.
- What happens after launch, and what does it cost? Hosting, updates, security patching, small changes. Get the annual figure, not a reassuring adjective.
- Can I edit it myself, and what breaks if I do? A site you cannot update is a site that is out of date in four months.
- What is explicitly excluded? The exclusions list tells you more about a quote than the inclusions list. If there isn't one, ask for one.
- What does it cost to change my mind at each stage? Revisions after design sign-off, and after build sign-off, are different prices everywhere. Find out before you need to know.
A studio that answers all seven clearly is one you can compare. A studio that answers "it depends" to all seven has told you something too.
The point
Vague pricing is not a negotiating tactic, it is an unfinished thought. Somebody has to do the work of deciding what a project actually contains, and if the studio doesn't do it up front, you will do it later, mid-project, at the worst possible moment and probably at your own expense.
We would rather have the argument about scope before the invoice than after it. That is why the figures are on the pricing page, why the gallery shows the finished work rather than describing it, and why the automation we build ships with a defined scope and an approval threshold instead of a promise to be careful.
If you know roughly what you need, tell us what you are building and you will get an itemised proposal within 24 hours — a list of parts with prices next to them, and a clear note on what is not included.
Every figure quoted above is Web Tactics' own published pricing as of 18 August 2026, not an industry benchmark. Prices are in UAE dirhams and are subject to scope; nothing here is a formal offer.