A straightforward bilingual business website built in Egypt costs between EGP 45,000 and EGP 90,000 in 2026. The same brief quoted by a Riyadh or Dubai agency comes back at SAR 30,000 to SAR 90,000. Both numbers are honest. I'm Khaled Ahmed, a full stack developer in Cairo with five years of professional work and 39+ shipped projects across eight countries, and this article explains exactly what that gap buys you — and when paying it is the right call.
1. The short answer, in numbers
Most people asking how much a website costs in Egypt want one number. There isn't one, because "website" covers everything from a five-page company profile to a multi-tenant booking platform with payment reconciliation. But the bands are tight enough to be useful, and I'd rather give you real ones than a form that says "contact us for pricing".
Here is what I actually see across the market. The Egypt column is what a competent senior freelancer or small studio charges. It is not the bottom of the market — you can pay less, and section 7 explains what happens when you do.
| Scope | Egypt (EGP) | USD equivalent | Realistic timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Company profile, 5–8 static pages, one language | 15,000 – 40,000 | $300 – $800 | 1–2 weeks |
| Business site, CMS, blog, Arabic + English, contact flows | 35,000 – 90,000 | $700 – $1,800 | 3–5 weeks |
| E-commerce, up to ~200 SKUs, one payment gateway, shipping | 70,000 – 200,000 | $1,400 – $4,000 | 6–10 weeks |
| Custom web app: bookings, portal, dashboards, roles | 150,000 – 600,000 | $3,000 – $12,000 | 2–5 months |
| SaaS MVP with billing, tenants and an admin back office | 300,000 – 1,200,000 | $6,000 – $24,000 | 3–7 months |
| Enterprise commerce with ERP integration and e-invoicing | 800,000+ | $16,000+ | 6 months+ |
Currency note, August 2026: I've converted at 50 EGP to the US dollar — the rate on 17 August 2026 was 50.26. The Egyptian pound has moved a great deal since the 2024 float and may well have moved again by the time you read this. SAR (3.75) and AED (3.6725) are pegged to the dollar and are stable. Convert at today's rate before you budget, and if you are a foreign buyer, ask to be quoted in USD so neither side is gambling on FX.
If you want the version of this that isn't Egypt-specific — international rates, why fixed fees beat hourly, how to size a build — I wrote that up separately in my full 2026 website pricing breakdown. This article is about the regional gap specifically, because that is where most of the money is won or lost.
2. How much does a business website cost in Egypt in EGP?
Take the most common request I get: an established Egyptian company — a clinic group, a contractor, a manufacturer, a law firm — wants a proper bilingual site. Arabic and English, right-to-left done properly, a services structure, team pages, a news or projects section they can update themselves, working forms that land in an inbox and a CRM, and Google Analytics 4 wired up.
That is EGP 45,000 to 90,000 from a good freelancer in 2026. Roughly $900 to $1,800. Four to six weeks.
What sits below it:
- EGP 3,000 – 10,000. A template dropped onto shared hosting by someone doing this alongside a day job. You will get pages that load. You will not get a build anyone can maintain, and the Arabic will be an afterthought.
- EGP 10,000 – 25,000. A WordPress theme configured competently, with a real content pass. For a small business that needs presence and nothing more, this is genuinely reasonable value and I say so to clients regularly. I lose work by saying it.
- EGP 25,000 – 45,000. WordPress done well, or a light custom front end: real design decisions, proper bilingual handling, performance work, schema markup.
And above it: EGP 90,000 to 250,000 buys custom design rather than a theme, a Laravel or Next.js build rather than a CMS, integrations with whatever systems you already run, and someone accountable for the thing for a year.
The single biggest fork in that range is platform. If your content is mostly pages and posts, WordPress is the cheaper correct answer. If your site has to do things — quotes, bookings, accounts, stock, approvals — a custom build costs more up front and less over three years. I laid the decision out honestly in WordPress vs Laravel, including the cases where I tell people not to hire me.
What Egyptian agencies charge for the same brief
A mid-sized Cairo agency will quote the same bilingual business site at EGP 90,000 to 220,000. That is not a rip-off. You are buying a project manager, a designer who is not also the developer, a QA pass, a company that still exists in three years, and a formal contract with a legal entity behind it. Whether that is worth two to three times the freelance price depends entirely on how much internal capacity you have to run the project yourself. I broke the tradeoff down in freelance developer vs agency.
3. What the same brief costs in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Europe
Here is the comparison that actually matters. One brief — bilingual business website, CMS, around 15 templates, forms, analytics — priced by who you hand it to. These are the bands I see when clients forward me competing quotes, converted so you can compare like with like.
| Who you hire | Local price | USD | Typical blended hourly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cairo freelancer, senior | EGP 45,000 – 90,000 | $900 – $1,800 | $25 – $50 |
| Cairo agency, mid-size | EGP 90,000 – 220,000 | $1,800 – $4,400 | $30 – $70 |
| Riyadh / Jeddah agency | SAR 30,000 – 90,000 | $8,000 – $24,000 | $60 – $160 |
| Dubai / Abu Dhabi agency | AED 30,000 – 110,000 | $8,200 – $30,000 | $70 – $180 |
| UK / Germany agency | £15,000 – £45,000 | $20,000 – $61,000 | $110 – $220 |
Read that table twice. The work described is identical. From the bottom of the Cairo band to the top of the London band, the price spans nearly seventy times. Anyone who tells you the Gulf number is pure markup is wrong, and anyone who tells you the Egyptian number means low quality is also wrong. Section 4 is the honest accounting of where the difference goes.
Two caveats on the Gulf figures. First, they widen fast once compliance enters: a Saudi e-commerce build that has to issue compliant tax invoices carries real integration work, which I covered in detail in ZATCA e-invoicing with Laravel. Second, payments are not a checkbox in this region — mada, Apple Pay, STC Pay, Tabby and Tamara each add work, and I went through the whole landscape in GCC payment gateway integration. A Gulf quote that includes those is not comparable to an Egyptian quote that doesn't.
4. Why do Saudi agencies quote far more than an Egyptian freelancer?
Because they are selling a different product, and because their cost base is genuinely different. Roughly in order of size:
Cost of delivery
A Riyadh agency pays Riyadh salaries, Riyadh rent, and often the cost of maintaining a Saudi commercial registration, VAT registration, and a workforce mix that satisfies local employment rules. A senior developer in Riyadh costs multiples of a senior developer in Cairo. None of that shows up on your invoice as a line item, but all of it is inside the number.
Risk pricing
A fixed-fee project that overruns is the agency's problem. Agencies price that risk in — typically 30% to 50% on top of estimated effort. A freelancer with lower overheads can carry a thinner buffer. This is real value, not padding: if the project goes sideways, you are not the one paying for it.
Procurement and proximity
If you are a Saudi semi-government entity or a large corporate, you may simply be unable to contract a foreign individual. You need a local CR, local VAT invoices, a bank account in-country, a legal entity you can pursue, sometimes a physical office for meetings. That constraint alone explains a large slice of the premium, and no amount of technical skill on my side removes it.
Layers
An agency quote covers an account manager, a project manager, a UI designer, a UX pass, a front end developer, a back end developer, a QA tester, and a slice of the sales cost of winning you. Perhaps four of those roles produce something you can see. When I take the same project, I am doing five of those jobs myself, and the two that get thinner are formal QA documentation and the meeting layer.
The honest version: on the table above, a Gulf agency lands somewhere between eight and thirteen times the Cairo freelance price. You are not paying ten times more for ten times better code. You are paying for insurance, local legal standing, and organisational capacity. If you need those, the Gulf price is fair. If you don't, you are buying overheads.
5. What exactly changes between a low-end and a high-end build?
This is the question buyers almost never ask, and it is the one that decides whether they are happy in year two. Two sites can look nearly identical on a laptop and differ thirtyfold in cost. Here is where the money goes.
| Dimension | EGP 8k build | EGP 60k build | EGP 250k+ build |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design | Purchased theme, colours swapped | Theme heavily customised, or a light custom system | Original design system, Figma source, component library |
| Arabic / RTL | Translated strings, layout breaks in places | Proper RTL, correct fonts, numerals and date formats | Two genuinely edited content sets, per-locale SEO, hreflang |
| Performance | Unoptimised images, 3–6s on 4G | Compressed assets, caching, sub-2s LCP on 4G | Budgeted Core Web Vitals, CDN, monitored in production |
| Code ownership | Often unclear; sits on their hosting | Your repository, documented handover | CI/CD, staging environment, versioned releases |
| Testing | Manual click-through on one browser | Cross-browser and device pass, form testing | Automated test suite, load testing, security review |
| Security | Whatever the plugins do | Hardened admin, backups, updates for a period | Threat model, audit trail, rate limiting, pen test |
| Failure behaviour | Payment fails silently, order lost | Errors logged, retried, surfaced to admin | Reconciliation, idempotency, alerting, defined recovery |
Look at the last row. That is where cheap builds hurt. A EGP 8,000 store will take payments correctly on a good day. The difference appears on the bad day: the gateway times out mid-transaction, the customer's card is charged, no order exists in your database, and nothing tells you. On a small catalogue that is an angry phone call. On a site doing meaningful volume it is a reconciliation problem you will pay many times the price of the build to unpick. I go through the full list of what a serious store needs in my e-commerce development guide.
6. The five line items that move the price most
Content and language
The most underestimated cost on every project in this region. Bilingual is not "run it through a translator". Arabic sets to a different length than English at the same meaning and breaks layouts designed for Latin script — mirroring, font metrics and line height, not just direction — it needs proper numeral and date handling, and it needs someone who can actually write. Budget EGP 8,000–25,000 for genuine Arabic content on a mid-size site, or accept that your Arabic version will read like a machine wrote it — and Arab buyers notice immediately.
Payments and tax compliance
One gateway with cards only: a few days. Egypt with Paymob or Fawry plus cash on delivery: more, because COD changes your entire order state machine. Saudi with mada, Apple Pay and a BNPL provider: more again. Add compliant tax invoicing and you are into weeks, not days.
Integrations
Every external system you connect is a fixed cost that does not care how big your site is. An ERP with a documented REST API might be two weeks. The same ERP with an undocumented SOAP endpoint and a vendor who replies once a week might be two months. Always ask a prospective developer to price integrations separately and to state what happens if the third party's API turns out to be worse than advertised.
Data model
Nobody quotes for this and it silently determines your cost for years. Getting the schema wrong means every future feature costs noticeably more than it should, and a few become impractical enough that you quietly stop asking for them. It is the cheapest thing to do properly and the most expensive thing to fix, which is why I wrote database design for web apps as a standalone piece.
Non-functional requirements
Speed, uptime, accessibility, security. These are invisible in a demo and they are most of the difference between a EGP 60k build and a EGP 250k build. If your quote does not mention performance targets, you have not bought performance. Slow sites lose money in ways that are hard to attribute — I dug into the mechanics in why your website loads slowly.
7. Is a cheaper offshore developer a false economy?
Sometimes. Not usually. And the honest answer depends on which cheap you mean, because there are two completely different things wearing the same price tag.
Cheap because of geography is real value. A senior developer in Cairo bills $25–$50 an hour for work that bills $120–$200 in London. That gap is cost of living and currency, not skill. The tools are identical — the same Laravel 13, the same Next.js, the same PostgreSQL, the same AWS console. There is no offshore version of a framework. This is the arbitrage that makes hiring a full stack developer in Egypt work, and it is why I have shipped for clients in the UK, Switzerland, France and Germany without ever being in the room.
Cheap because of seniority is where people get burned. A $8/hour developer is not a discounted senior; they are someone learning on your project. You pay the difference in rework, in months of drift, and eventually in a rebuild.
The reliable signals that separate them:
- They push back on your brief. A senior developer will tell you which of your requested features is a bad idea. Someone who agrees to everything in the first call has not read it.
- They quote a range with named assumptions, not a suspiciously round single number.
- You can see running code. Live URLs you can open and test on your own phone. Not screenshots. Mine are on my portfolio page, including the seven apps I have live on Google Play.
- They answer the ownership question without hesitating. Ask who owns the repository, the domain and the server after final payment. If the answer is vague, walk. This is the most common way small businesses in Egypt and the Gulf end up hostage to a supplier, and it is exactly why I wrote who owns your website code.
- Overlap you can live with. Cairo is UTC+2, and UTC+3 from late April to late October: a full working-day overlap with the UK and EU, and an afternoon overlap with US East. Timezone excuses in this region are not credible.
The false economy that actually recurs is not offshore. It is underscoped. A EGP 20,000 quote for a EGP 90,000 brief is not a bargain; it is a quote for a different, smaller project that you will discover in week six.
8. What ongoing costs come after launch?
The number most quotes bury. A website is not a purchase, it is a subscription with a large setup fee. Here is a realistic annual running cost for a mid-size business site, checked as of August 2026 — providers change their pricing, so treat these as the shape of the bill rather than a fixed quote.
| Item | Small business site | E-commerce / web app | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain | $10 – $20 / yr | $10 – $60 / yr | .sa and .com.eg need documentation and are slower to move |
| Hosting | $40 – $150 / yr | $150 – $1,200 / yr | Shared vs a real VPS; region matters for latency |
| SSL | $0 | $0 – $80 / yr | Let's Encrypt is fine for almost everyone |
| Email (Google Workspace / M365) | $84+ / user / yr | $84+ / user / yr | Workspace Business Starter is $7/user/month on annual billing; never run business email off your web host |
| Backups and monitoring | $0 – $120 / yr | $120 – $600 / yr | Offsite, tested, not just "the host does it" |
| Payment gateway fees | — | 1% – 3.5% per transaction | Saudi mada debit sits at the bottom of that range; international cards at the top. Plus setup and sometimes a monthly minimum |
| Maintenance / updates | $300 – $1,200 / yr | $1,200 – $6,000 / yr | Framework and dependency updates, small fixes |
| Content and SEO | $0 – $3,000 / yr | $1,200 – $12,000 / yr | Optional, but this is what makes the site earn |
Two rules of thumb I give every client. First, running costs have a floor that does not shrink because your build was cheap: assume at least $450 a year for a small business site and $1,500 or more for a store or web app, before any content and SEO spend. Against Egyptian build prices, that works out at roughly 25% to 50% of the build cost per year on a small site, settling towards 15% to 25% once the build is large. Second, whoever built it should be contractually available for at least twelve months, at a stated rate, or you are one resignation away from an unmaintainable asset.
Hosting is where people over- and under-spend at the same time — paying for a managed platform they don't need while running a database that would be happier on a $12 VPS. I walked through how to choose in choosing web hosting in 2026. And whatever you host on, run through the website security checklist before you take a single real payment; the cost of getting that wrong dwarfs every number in this article.
If you'd rather not think about any of it, that is what fixed monthly care plans exist for.
9. How to read a quote before you sign
Most bad website projects in this region are bad procurement, not bad code. A quote you can actually evaluate looks like this:
SCOPE
12 page templates (list in appendix A)
Arabic + English, RTL, hreflang
Filament admin, 3 roles
Paymob card + COD; Stripe for non-EGP
ERP: read products/stock via REST (see assumption 3)
ASSUMPTIONS
1. Client supplies final content by week 2
2. Design approved in max 2 revision rounds
3. ERP exposes a documented REST API with a test env
4. <= 3 gateway environments to certify against
EXCLUDED
Content writing, translation, photography
Ongoing SEO, paid ads, hosting fees
DELIVERABLES
Git repo (client org), staging + production, handover doc,
90 min training call, 60 days bug-fix warranty
PRICE EGP 165,000 fixed | 40% start, 30% UAT, 30% go-live
CHANGES Anything outside scope: EGP 900/hr, written approval firstIf the quote you are holding does not have an assumptions block and an excluded block, it is not a quote — it is a hope. Almost every dispute I have watched between a business and a developer in Egypt or the Gulf traced back to a line that was never written down. Before you shortlist anyone, run through how to hire a web developer, and if you are contracting locally, get the ownership and payment-milestone language right in writing — I put a web development contract template together for exactly that.
Payment structure that protects both sides
- Never pay 100% up front. Any developer who asks for it is telling you something.
- Never pay 0% up front either. Nobody serious starts a two-month build on a promise, and if they do, you are not their priority client.
- 30/30/40 or 40/30/30 across start, acceptance and launch works. Tie the final tranche to go-live, not to an arbitrary date.
- For projects above roughly $10,000, milestone-based escrow is worth the fee for a first engagement.
10. What I charge, and how I scope it
Since I am asking you to trust these ranges, here is where I sit in them. I work fixed-fee, not hourly, because hourly punishes me for being fast and punishes you for asking questions.
- Bilingual business site: EGP 45,000 – 90,000 / roughly $900 – $1,800.
- E-commerce with one or two gateways: EGP 90,000 – 280,000 / roughly $1,800 – $5,600.
- Custom Laravel or Next.js application: from EGP 180,000 / roughly $3,600, scoped per feature.
- SaaS MVP: from EGP 350,000 / roughly $7,000, typically staged over three to five months.
- Mobile app, React Native or Flutter, with a backend: from EGP 250,000 / roughly $5,000.
Those are ranges with assumptions, not quotes. What moves a project to the top of its band is almost always integrations, a real design system, or compliance work. What moves it to the bottom is content you already have and decisions you can make quickly.
I quote in USD, SAR or AED for clients outside Egypt so that currency movement is my problem rather than yours. The full list of what I build is on the services page, and I will tell you when a project is better served by a template than by me — that conversation costs you nothing and saves both of us a bad engagement.
11. If your budget is fixed, spend it in this order
Say you have EGP 60,000, or SAR 20,000, and a business that needs to start earning. Priority order, and I would defend this against anyone:
- The one page that converts. Whatever your buyer needs to see before they contact you. Get this excellent before anything else exists.
- Speed on a mobile network. Most of your traffic in Egypt and the Gulf is on a phone, frequently on mobile data. A two-second site with plain design beats a beautiful six-second one every single time. Mobile-first design is not a style preference here, it is where the traffic is.
- Working contact and tracking. Forms that arrive, WhatsApp that opens, calls that connect, and analytics that tell you which of them did the work.
- Technical SEO fundamentals. Clean URLs, real titles, structured data, an accurate sitemap, correct hreflang if you are bilingual. Cheap during the build, expensive to retrofit — the 2026 SEO checklist is the version I actually work from.
- Everything else. Animation, a blog you won't write, a chatbot, a custom illustration set. All of it can wait.
The most common way a small budget gets wasted in this market is spending 70% of it on visual design and 5% on whether the thing loads, converts, and can be found.
12. The verdict
A serious bilingual business website costs EGP 45,000–90,000 in Egypt, SAR 30,000–90,000 from a Gulf agency, and $20,000+ in Western Europe — for the same deliverable. The gap is cost base, risk pricing and local legal standing, not quality. If you need a local entity for procurement reasons, pay the Gulf price without resentment. If you don't, hiring directly in Egypt is the largest single saving available to you on a web project, and it does not cost you anything technically.
What should worry you is not a low number. It is a number with no assumptions attached, no ownership clause, and no answer to what happens after launch.
If you want a real figure for your specific project rather than a band, tell me what you're building. The consultation is free, I reply within 24 hours, and you get a fixed-fee quote with the scope, assumptions and exclusions written down — whether or not you end up working with me.