What a Website Actually Costs in Lebanon

Nobody publishes this, and the silence is doing real damage. People asking for a website here have no reference point, so quotes arrive with no way to judge them, and the gap between the cheapest and most expensive answer for the same job can be a factor of ten.

I am not going to pretend there is one number. But there is a structure to the cost, and once you can see it you can read any quote — mine or anyone else's — and tell what you are being charged for.

You are paying for decisions and time, not pages

The instinct is to price by page count. It is almost useless.

A five-page brochure site where every page is text and a photo is a small job. A three-page site where one of those pages is a booking system with availability, confirmations and an admin view is a much bigger one. Pages are not the unit. Distinct behaviours are.

When you get a quote, the useful question is not "why is it this much for five pages" but "which parts of this are custom, and which are assembled from things you have built before".

What genuinely moves the price

In rough order of how much they add:

Selling things. A catalogue, a basket, order records, payment states, stock. Doing it properly for Lebanon means cash on delivery as a real path, two currencies with a rate you control, and an order that can continue over WhatsApp. This is the single biggest multiplier.

Two languages. Not the translation itself — the structure underneath. Separate URLs per language, mirrored layouts, hreflang, an admin panel that holds both versions. Adding Arabic properly after the fact costs considerably more than building for it from the start.

A CMS you actually control. A site you can edit yourself costs more up front than one where every change is a phone call to a developer. It usually pays for itself within a year, and it removes the worst dependency in this industry: needing to reach a specific person to change your own opening hours.

Integrations. Anything that talks to something else — payment provider, delivery company, accounting, an existing stock system. The cost here is rarely the code. It is the discovery, the edge cases, and whatever the other system does badly.

Migrating an existing site. Moving without losing your search rankings is careful work: mapping every old URL to a new one, preserving metadata, redirecting properly. Skip it and you can lose traffic you spent years earning.

What you are often overpaying for

Design rounds with no brief. Endless revisions because nobody agreed what the site was for. Agree the goal and the structure before anyone opens a design tool.

A custom build of something standard. A blog, a contact form and a photo gallery are solved problems. Paying for bespoke versions of them is paying for someone's learning.

A mobile app you do not need. Most businesses asking for an app want a website that works well on a phone. An app means two builds, two review processes, and persuading people to install something. The bar for needing one is high.

Monthly fees with nothing behind them. Ask what a retainer actually covers. Hosting and a domain are small, known costs. If a monthly fee is much larger than those, you should be able to name what the difference buys.

The running costs, which are smaller than people expect

Separate from the build:

A domain is a fixed yearly cost, typically in the range of ten to twenty dollars for a .com. Register it in your own name. This is not negotiable — if your developer owns your domain, they own your business's address.
Hosting for a normal business site is cheap and often free at low traffic on modern platforms. A brochure site should not carry a meaningful hosting bill.
Maintenance is real but optional in the short term. Things drift: dependencies age, a payment provider changes an API, content goes stale.

The honest version is that a small site's running costs can be under fifty dollars a year. Anyone quoting substantially more should be able to say what the extra is for.

When you should not hire a developer at all

Genuinely:

You just need to be findable. A complete Google Business Profile and an active Instagram will serve you better than a neglected website. Do those first. They are free.
You are testing whether the business works. Validate demand before commissioning software. A website will not create demand that is not there.
You need a shop, quickly, and you are small. A hosted platform will get you selling this week. You will hit its limits eventually — particularly around cash on delivery and currency — and that is a fine problem to have later.

A developer is worth it when you have something specific that off-the-shelf tools cannot do, when the site is load-bearing for your revenue, or when you need to own what you have built.

What a real quote looks like

Whoever you hire, a quote you can trust has: the scope written down, what is explicitly not included, what you must provide and by when, a delivery date, and what happens after handover.

That last one matters most and is asked about least. Find out, in writing, before you pay anything: who owns the code and the domain, and what happens if you stop working together. The answer should be that you own both and can take them to anyone else.

If a quote cannot tell you that, the price is not the problem.

So what do I charge

For what it's worth, my own work starts at $300 for a brochure site, $500 for one with a CMS you manage yourself, and $700 upwards for e-commerce. Those are US dollars, and they are starting points rather than quotes — what you actually pay is decided by the behaviours listed further up, which is the whole argument of this piece.

If you want a real number for your own project, tell me what it has to do and I will come back with a written scope and a price before any work starts.

If you are weighing a rebuild rather than a first site, moving off WordPress without losing your rankings covers what that actually involves. For the selling side, what actually works when you sell online in Lebanon goes through cash on delivery, two currencies and WhatsApp ordering in detail.

I build business websites and online shops for companies in Lebanon, including in Tripoli, Minieh and Akkar. To talk about a project, get in touch.