Ask five agencies in Cairo to quote the same website and the numbers will differ by a factor of ten. That is not a broken market. It is what happens when one word covers everything from a five page brochure to a bilingual store wired into a courier and a stock feed. So here are the bands we actually see in 2026, and the variables that decide which one your brief lands in.
Four bands of website costs in Egypt, and what sits in each
A brochure site, five to eight pages, one language, a configured theme and no integrations, runs roughly 40,000 to 90,000 EGP with a capable freelancer or a small studio. A bilingual SME site with custom design, a content system the marketing team can actually operate, a blog, tracked lead forms and analytics wired to real events lands between 150,000 and 400,000 EGP. An online store on Shopify or WooCommerce with local payment and courier integrations starts near 250,000 EGP and passes 800,000 once catalog depth, variants, branch stock or a loyalty scheme enter the brief. A custom platform with logic of its own, a customer portal, negotiated price lists, an approval workflow, begins where that ends and is priced in engineering months rather than in pages.
The bands are wide because the same brief costs different money depending on who delivers it. A freelancer, a five person studio and a full agency will not quote within three times of each other, and the gap is rarely craft. It is project management, testing on real devices, a performance budget somebody enforces, documentation, and whether anyone answers the phone in eighteen months.
Five things that genuinely move a quote
Page count is the weakest driver and the one clients negotiate hardest. A tenth page inside a design system that already exists is close to free. What moves the number is bilingual delivery, because Arabic is a second design pass, a second copy pass and a second round of testing rather than a switch in the admin. Integrations move it, because every payment gateway, courier API, ERP link and CRM handoff is scoped engineering with a sandbox, edge cases and a failure mode. Content moves it, because photography, product shots and written copy are what actually delay launch and the line nobody budgets for. Custom design against a configured template is the largest single fork on the list. And performance and accessibility cost real hours when they are requirements, and nothing at all when nobody checks.
Currency belongs in the same conversation. Platform subscriptions, premium plugins, design seats, cloud hosting and transactional email are billed in dollars, and the pound has moved a long way since the 2024 float. Price those lines in the currency they are incurred in, keep them out of the build budget, and review them once a year before they quietly double.
The costs that never appear on the proposal
Hosting, domain and business email for the next three years. A maintenance retainer, which in this market runs from a few thousand EGP a month for a brochure site to a five figure monthly number for an active store. Payment gateway economics, which are a setup fee plus a percentage of every order rather than a one time cost. Content refreshes, because a site nobody updates stops earning inside a year.
Then the cheap quote trap. A site assembled in a page builder with no staging environment, no documentation and no analytics is not a saving, it is a deposit on a rebuild, and we replace far more three year old sites than ten year old ones. Ask any builder three questions before you sign. Who owns the code, the domain and the accounts. Where does staging live. What exactly is included in handover.
If you want a number for your brief rather than a market average, that scoping conversation is where our website and app development team starts, and a free audit of the current site will tell you how much of it can be kept.
