A marketing website in Saudi Arabia typically starts around SAR 7,000 and ships in three to six weeks. Design-only work starts near SAR 5,000, and an ecommerce store starts around SAR 12,000. Bilingual Arabic and English builds cost meaningfully more because the work is genuinely larger, not because of a translation surcharge.
The short answer, by project type
Most quotes you will receive in Saudi Arabia fall into a handful of bands. The numbers below are our published starting prices, and they are the same ones we quote on a call. They exclude VAT.
- Web design only, from SAR 5,000. Design files, no build.
- Marketing website, built and deployed, from SAR 7,000. Three to six weeks.
- Shopify storefront, from SAR 9,000. Three to six weeks.
- Website redesign, from SAR 9,000. Four to eight weeks.
- Custom ecommerce store, from SAR 12,000. Six to ten weeks.
- Mobile app, from SAR 25,000. Eight to sixteen weeks.
What actually moves the price
Agencies rarely explain this, which is why two quotes for the same brief can differ by a factor of three. In practice five things drive almost all the variance.
- Page and template count. Ten unique layouts costs more than one layout used ten times, and most sites need fewer unique templates than people assume.
- Bilingual Arabic and English. A properly designed Arabic version is close to a second design pass, not a translation step.
- Integrations. Every system the site talks to, whether an ERP, a CRM, a payment gateway or ZATCA invoicing, is scoped work.
- Content. If copy, photography and product data do not exist yet, that is either your time or our cost.
- Custom functionality. Booking flows, calculators, portals and dashboards are software, and they get priced as software.
Why is a bilingual Arabic and English site more expensive?
Because Arabic is not English flipped horizontally. Arabic type sets differently, needs different line lengths to stay readable, and has its own conventions for numerals, punctuation and emphasis. A layout that was designed for English and then mirrored will have awkward line breaks, cramped headings and, more often than people notice, a broken keyboard focus order.
There is also a search dimension. The Arabic and English versions each need their own crawlable URLs and correct hreflang annotation. Skip that and the two versions compete with each other in Google, which is worse than having only one of them.
Roughly 71 percent of search queries in Saudi Arabia are in Arabic. If your buyers are Saudi consumers, an English-only site is not a cost saving, it is a decision to skip most of your market.
If budget forces a choice, build one language properly rather than two badly. A well-built Arabic-only site beats a mirrored bilingual one for a Saudi consumer audience.
What about the SAR 1,500 quotes?
They exist, and for some businesses they are genuinely the right call. A very cheap quote almost always means a page-builder template with your logo dropped in, hosted on shared hosting, with no custom design and no integration work. If you need a presence online this week and nothing more, that is a reasonable purchase.
What you should know is what it costs later. Template builds accumulate plugins, get slower with each one, and are difficult to extend when you eventually need a real feature. The rebuild usually arrives within two years, and it costs more than the original because there is now content and search equity to migrate.
How to compare quotes without being misled
Ask every agency the same five questions. The answers separate a real quote from a number pulled out of the air.
- What exactly is in scope, template by template? Vague scope is where cost overruns live.
- Is Arabic included, and is it designed or mirrored? Ask to see an Arabic page they have shipped.
- Who owns the code and the hosting account when we are done?
- What happens when we want a change after launch, and what does it cost?
- Is the price fixed, and what triggers a change order?
Timelines you should expect
Price and timeline move together, and an unrealistic timeline is usually a sign of an unrealistic quote. A marketing site is three to six weeks from a signed scope. An ecommerce build is six to ten weeks. Anything with a booking system, a portal or an ERP integration should be assumed to take longer, and the discovery phase is where you find out how much longer.
The single most common cause of delay is not development. It is content. Copy, product data and photography that do not exist when the build starts will hold up launch regardless of how fast anyone codes.
