What It Costs and How Long It Takes — Digital Project Pricing

A simple landing page runs SAR 500 to 2,000. A full company site with service pages, an admin panel, and two languages runs SAR 3,000 to 15,000. A site with special features such as a booking system or a members area starts around SAR 10,000. The real price difference does not come from page count but from three factors: is the content ready or being written, is the design from a template or custom, and are there integrations with other systems.

A simple app with a handful of screens and no complex backend starts around SAR 10,000. An app with sign-in, a database, and notifications runs SAR 20,000 to 60,000. One with payments, maps, and an admin dashboard goes beyond that. Using React Native cuts roughly a third off the cost versus building two separate native apps for iOS and Android, because one codebase serves both platforms.

On a ready platform such as Salla or Zid: an annual subscription of SAR 1,000 to 5,000 plus setup and branding of SAR 2,000 to 8,000. A fully custom store starts at SAR 15,000 and reaches SAR 50,000 and beyond depending on inventory, shipping, and e-invoicing integrations. The practical rule: if you have fewer than a thousand products and no unusual pricing logic, a ready platform is clearly cheaper.

A system covering one process — order management or maintenance tracking — starts around SAR 8,000. One covering three to five connected processes with user permissions and reporting runs SAR 25,000 to 80,000. The advice that saves more than any negotiation: do not build the whole system at once. Build the most painful process first, run it for three months, then expand based on what you actually learned.

One specific automation — turning a website form into a WhatsApp message and a row in a follow-up sheet — runs SAR 1,500 to 5,000 as a one-off, plus any tool subscription. A bundle of three to five connected automations runs SAR 8,000 to 25,000. Judge it with a simple formula: staff hours saved per month multiplied by the cost of an hour. Most good automations pay for themselves within four to eight months.

The cost has two parts that must always be separated: a one-off build, and a monthly run cost. An assistant that answers from your documents starts around SAR 8,000 to build and SAR 100 to 1,500 a month to run depending on usage. A solution that reads invoices and extracts their data into your system starts around SAR 15,000. Training a model from scratch is rarely justified for a small company — using a ready model’s API is cheaper and more accurate in most cases.

Because each quote assumes a different scope in the estimator’s head. A SAR 5,000 quote may mean a ready template with colours and text changed. A SAR 25,000 quote for the same description may include custom design, two languages, an admin panel, SEO work, and a month of support. The fix is not picking the cheapest but standardising the request: send the same document to everyone and require each quote to state what it excludes. Only then is the comparison fair.

Six items usually forgotten at budgeting time: domain and hosting annually, an SSL certificate if not included, payment gateway fees and their per-transaction cut, the cost of setting up and connecting e-invoicing, content writing and professional photography, and post-launch maintenance and security updates. Add 15 to 25 percent on top of the development price as a first-year reserve and you will survive most surprises.

A .com domain runs SAR 40 to 80 a year; a .sa domain is slightly higher and requires commercial registration documents. Hosting varies widely: shared hosting is SAR 200 to 600 a year and is fine for a brochure site; modern platforms such as Vercel offer a free tier that covers many small sites and a paid tier around USD 20 a month; a dedicated server for a store or a large system starts at SAR 2,000 a year and rises with traffic.

It is necessary for any site that receives user data or processes payments, because security vulnerabilities are continuously discovered in the libraries it uses and need patching. A basic maintenance contract — backups, security updates, uptime monitoring, and small content edits — runs SAR 300 to 1,500 a month. A fully static brochure site can get by with a quarterly review instead of a monthly contract.

A landing page takes three to seven days. A five-to-ten-page company site in two languages takes two to six weeks. An online store takes four to ten weeks. But the factor that delays projects more than the programming itself is content: text, images, and the logo. Projects where all the material arrives ready on signing day typically finish in half the expected time.

A simple app takes four to eight weeks. A mid-sized app with accounts and payments takes three to six months. Always add two to three weeks for store review: the App Store usually takes a day to a week and may reject a first submission on formal grounds, while Google Play is generally faster. Start the developer account paperwork on day one rather than in the final week — business identity verification alone can take days.

Connecting two modern systems that each expose a documented API takes two days to two weeks. Connecting to a legacy system with no API can take a month or more, because the data has to be extracted through workarounds. The question that determines the timeline before anything else: does the existing system provide an API? Ask its vendor that exact question before requesting an integration quote, because the answer doubles or halves the estimate.

An MVP is the smallest launchable version that solves the core problem and is used by real customers. Its value is not direct saving but avoiding the wrong build: most projects discover after launch that a third of the requested features go unused. By launching a first version in four to eight weeks, you pay for what you actually need rather than what you imagined before anyone touched the system.

Fixed price is better when the scope is clear and written down, because it shifts delay risk to the developer and gives you a number to plan against. Hourly is better when the scope is vague or shifting, because a fixed price in that case carries a high risk margin that you pay for. The fairest practical arrangement: a fixed price for a defined first version, then hourly or a monthly block of hours for ongoing development afterwards.

Work backwards: what value will the project generate per year? If the site brings ten customers a month at an average profit of SAR 1,000 each, a SAR 15,000 budget pays back in two months. Then split the budget: 60% development, 20% content and design, 20% first-year reserve. The common mistake is setting the number emotionally — "I want something for five thousand" — without tying it to any expected return.

Return is measured in two entirely different ways. A website is measured by added revenue: monthly orders or enquiries multiplied by average customer value. An automation is measured by cost avoided: staff hours saved plus the value of errors that stop happening. Automation usually proves itself faster because the saving starts in week one, whereas a website needs three to six months to build up its search presence.

Cheaper at the start, not always cheaper later. A ready template is entirely appropriate when your need is standard and you do not intend to add special logic. But once you need a feature the template was not designed for, bending it costs more than building it from scratch, because you are fighting a structure you did not choose. The rule: a template for a brochure site and a blog, a custom build for any system carrying your company’s own business rules.

Because a change during development touches code still fresh in the developer’s head with nothing built on top of it yet. After delivery, the project must be reopened, the current state re-understood, the change tested so it does not break what now works, and redeployed without downtime. That is why reviewing the design carefully at the first approval stage — before code is written — is the cheapest hour in the whole project.

It is a project expanding through a string of small requests, each looking trivial, until size and timeline double without anyone noticing. The remedy is simple and needs no rigidity: log every new request into a "phase two" list rather than refusing it, and evaluate the whole list after launch. That protects the date, preserves every good idea, and usually reveals that a third of the requests are no longer wanted once the first version is seen working.

Yes — a deposit is normal and justified, because the developer is reserving time they cannot sell to anyone else. A reasonable share is 25 to 40 percent. What is not reasonable is full payment upfront for work not yet started, or a deposit above half. Tie the deposit to an early deliverable — a design prototype or a first working version within two weeks — so you see a real signal of progress early instead of waiting until the end.

Build a table with six columns: what is included, what is excluded, number of revision rounds, length of post-launch support, ownership of code and accounts, and total two-year cost including hosting and maintenance. Fill it from the literal wording of both quotes, not from your impression. In most cases the ranking flips entirely at the last column, and the cheaper option at signing turns out to be the more expensive one over two years.

Rebuild if two of these hold: the platform no longer receives security updates, every small change breaks something else, or the site fails mobile performance testing and cannot be fixed without restructuring. Patch if the structure is sound and the problem is only appearance or content. The decisive test: if expected patching cost exceeds 60 percent of a new build, the new build is cheaper and buys you additional years.

No. The first consultation with Saeed Baatiah is free and covers understanding your current situation, determining whether the project is feasible on your budget, and proposing the simplest path to your goal — even when that path does not involve hiring him. What becomes billable is a deep technical assessment of an existing system or writing a detailed requirements document. To start the consultation: wa.me/966573784181

Send a WhatsApp message to wa.me/966573784181 with four lines: the type of project, the three most important things it must do, which systems it must connect to if any, and your target launch date. Those four are enough for an initial quote with a price range. The final detailed proposal follows a short call to clarify the edge cases, because those move the price — not the page count.