Website Design Cost in Saudi Arabia: The Line Items Behind a Quote

Ask three studios to quote a corporate website for a Riyadh company and the numbers will often differ so widely that they look like they belong to different projects. Usually they do. One quote assumes a translated template with ten pages; another assumes a custom Arabic-first build with copywriting, lead tracking and a year of maintenance; a third leaves the domain, hosting and privacy policy for you to sort out later. None of them is necessarily wrong. They simply priced different scopes.

This guide does not give you a price, because a price means little without a scope. It shows where the effort goes, the Saudi-specific items that are easy to forget, and a way to put proposals side by side so you compare scope rather than totals.

What moves a Saudi website quote most

The table ranks the items that most often make one Saudi quote a multiple of another. The relative effort is RX’s professional judgement from scoping corporate websites, not a market survey.

If two quotes differ widely, check the top three rows first. That is usually where the difference lies.

Why Saudi website quotes rarely describe the same project

A website quote is a bundle of decisions. When those decisions are not written down, each bidder fills the gaps with its own assumptions, and the price follows the assumptions. In Saudi Arabia three gaps cause most of the spread:

• Language. “Bilingual” can mean an English site with a machine-translated Arabic copy, or two properly written versions with a right-to-left layout that has been designed and tested, not just mirrored.
• Content. Some quotes include writing every page; others expect you to supply final text in both languages, which is usually the slowest part of the whole project.
• What happens after launch. Hosting, domain renewal, licences, security updates and content changes are recurring costs. Some proposals bundle a period of them; many leave them out entirely.

Before comparing totals, make every bidder answer the same questions. The rest of this guide is a list of those questions.

The line items that move the price

The table below lists the components that most often explain why one proposal is higher than another. Use the middle column as your question to each bidder.

Arabic and search set-up: two questions to ask

A proper Arabic version is planned from the first wireframe, not translated at the end, and a two-language site needs its search signals set up so each version is found in its own language. Ask every bidder two things: is the Arabic version designed and tested in right-to-left on mobile, with real content, and are the hreflang pairs between Arabic and English pages in scope? Our guide to Arabic and English website structure in the Gulf covers both in detail.

WhatsApp: the button is cheap, the messages are not part of the build

A WhatsApp button that opens a chat is a minor item. Connecting the site to the WhatsApp Business Platform for automated replies or follow-ups is a different scope, and the messages themselves are billed by Meta, not by your web studio. Meta charges per message; marketing templates are always charged, and since 1 October 2026 only the first 1,000 service messages per business number each month are free, with in-window utility messages also charged (see our October 2026 pricing guide); rates vary by message category and country (Meta for Developers). Meta revises its rate cards periodically, so check the current rates when you budget. Keep that running cost out of the build comparison but inside your budget.

Saudi-specific items to check in every proposal

These are not the most expensive parts of a project, but they are the ones most often missing from a quote, and each can delay launch if nobody owns it.

The .sa domain and the documents behind it

SaudiNIC’s registration rules allow any natural person or legal entity to register under .sa, while .com.sa is dedicated to entities providing commercial services and requires a valid commercial registration or equivalent from a Saudi authority, or a trade name or trademark registered locally with the Ministry of Commerce (SaudiNIC registration rules). The same rules also define Arabic-script domain names under .السعودية; confirm current availability and conditions with SaudiNIC. Two practical points belong in the proposal: who prepares the documents, and in whose name the domain is registered. It should be your company, not the studio.

The privacy policy is now a compliance item

Saudi Arabia’s Personal Data Protection Law came into effect on 14 September 2023, with most controllers given until 14 September 2024 to comply; the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA) is the regulator (DLA Piper, Data Protection Laws of the World). SDAIA’s guideline on developing privacy policies, adopted in August 2024 (Digital Policy Alert), expects a policy to cover, among other things, the categories of data collected and whether each is mandatory, the purpose, whether data is shared, where it is stored and for how long, data subject rights and a complaints mechanism, in clear language that is reviewed periodically (CMS).

A website that collects names and phone numbers through a contact form is collecting personal data. That has two cost consequences. First, someone has to write an accurate privacy policy in Arabic and English that reflects what the site actually does, which usually means input from your legal adviser rather than a template pasted in at the end. Second, the build has to match the policy: which fields are mandatory, where form submissions are stored, which third-party tools receive them.

Where the site and its data are hosted

The PDPL permits transfers of personal data outside the Kingdom for defined purposes and under conditions, such as transfers to countries SDAIA considers adequate or with appropriate safeguards, and some sectors face additional restrictions (DLA Piper). For a website, that makes hosting location and the location of your form and CRM tools a scope question, not just a technical preference. Ask each bidder where the site, its backups and its form submissions will physically sit, and let your adviser decide whether that is acceptable for your sector.

VAT on the invoice

ZATCA’s guideline on the increase of the standard VAT rate states that registered persons must charge VAT at 15% on standard-rated supplies made from 1 July 2020 (ZATCA), and a website build is a standard-rated service. Some proposals show totals before VAT and some after; a 15% difference is enough to make the cheaper-looking quote the more expensive one. Ask every bidder to state the figure both ways.

One-off costs versus running costs

A fair comparison separates what you pay once from what you pay every year. Ask each bidder to fill in the same two lists.

One-off:

• Discovery, sitemap and content plan
• Design of each unique layout, in Arabic and English
• Copywriting and revision rounds
• Development, integrations and testing
• SEO foundations and redirects from the old site
• Privacy policy implementation and consent wording
• Training for the people who will edit the site

Recurring:

• Domain renewal
• Hosting, backups and security monitoring
• Paid theme or plugin licences, and any third-party form or CRM subscriptions
• WhatsApp Business Platform messages, if used
• Maintenance and updates: what a care plan should cover
• New pages, content updates and campaign landing pages

A proposal that is cheap to build but requires the studio for every text change is not cheap over three years.

Three bids, one brief: a worked comparison

Send every bidder the same written brief (our website RFP guide sets out the full brief, sitemap and content scope) and ask for the price in one format: one-off and recurring costs separately, before and after 15% VAT. Then rewrite every answer into the same grid.

Hypothetical example. A Riyadh MEP contractor needs a site that supports pre-qualification. It covers six services and twelve reference projects, with Arabic as the primary language and a quotation form. The contractor sends one brief, receives three bids and rewrites them line by line:

Read across the rows:

• Bid A leaves the slowest work, bilingual copy, with the contractor.
• Bid B looks mid-priced partly because it is the only bid quoted after VAT. Restate all three before VAT, or all after.
• Bid C is the only bid that meets the purpose: credible Arabic project pages for consultants reviewing a pre-qualification.

The contractor shortlists B and C, and asks B to price Arabic copywriting and mobile RTL testing so the two are comparable. Scoring answers rather than totals is the point: a higher quote that includes Arabic copy, tested RTL and a privacy policy is often the lower real cost once you price what the cheaper one leaves out. To vet the bidders themselves, from portfolios to ownership terms, use our guide on how to choose a web design company.

When to get help with the scope itself

Many companies struggle less with choosing a studio than with deciding what the site is for. If the sitemap, the buyer you want to reach and the content you can realistically produce are still unclear, any quote is a guess. That is the work RX Designer’s website design service starts with: structure and copy first, then design and a WordPress build connected to your campaigns and search, with SEO planned in rather than added later. You can see examples on the websites portfolio, including the Azeidk Group website RX built: a gateway that sends every visitor to the right country and language, Saudi Arabia or Egypt, Arabic or English, with WhatsApp and an AI assistant built in.

If you want an outside view before you write the brief, a business diagnosis session is a structured way to pin down purpose, pages and priorities so every proposal you receive answers the same questions.