Honest buying guide
How to choose an agency, including when not to choose us
Most guides like this are sales pages wearing a disguise. This one names the situations where we are the wrong choice, compares the three agency models honestly, and gives you ten questions that expose a weak fit before you sign anything.
When we are the wrong choice
No agency suits every project. Here are five situations where we will point you elsewhere, and where to go instead.
You need branding, campaigns, PR and content production alongside the build.
A full-service agency will serve you better. We build websites, apps and automation. We do not run marketing departments, and pretending otherwise would waste your budget.
Your main need is paid advertising, run and optimised week after week.
Hire a PPC specialist. Ad management is a full-time discipline with its own tooling, and a part-time generalist will burn your ad spend.
You want the cheapest possible site and the content is mostly static.
Use a website builder, or hire a freelancer working from a template. Paying senior rates for a five-page brochure site is poor value, whoever you hire.
You need a team of developers embedded in your company for a year.
That is staff augmentation, not a build. An offshore dev shop or a technical recruiter will serve you better than any two-person engagement can.
You need work started this week, and we are at capacity.
We keep our intake deliberately small and will tell you plainly if we cannot start straight away. A larger firm with bench capacity can start sooner. Waiting for us is only worth it if the fit is right.
Three models, honestly compared
| Solo senior builderThat's us | Full-service local agency | Offshore dev shop | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | The person you met. No handoff between sales and delivery. | A team of specialists: design, development, project management, QA. Genuinely more depth than one person can offer. | A developer pool abroad, usually behind a local account manager. Ask for names. |
| How pricing is set | A fixed quote after discovery is typical. Ours is a fixed AED price agreed before work starts. | A proposal priced to cover a full team. Digital Gravity's own FAQ puts typical Dubai website design at AED 10,000 to 50,000. | Hourly or milestone billing. Clutch lists Dubai web agencies mostly at $25 to $99 per hour, with minimum projects commonly from $5,000. |
| What happens on overruns | A fixed quote means the builder absorbs the cost. The honest risk is schedule slip, not a surprise invoice. | Formal change requests. Extra scope costs extra, but the paper trail protects both sides. | Hourly billing puts overrun cost on you. Watch for a pattern of change orders. |
| Response path | A direct line to the person who wrote the code. No cover if that person is ill or on leave. | An account manager, then the team. Slower per message, but someone always picks up. | Tickets across time zones. Overnight turnaround can genuinely help on small fixes. |
| Post-launch ownership | Usually clean: one author, one codebase. We hand over full code ownership with no lock-in, and you should demand the same from anyone. | Varies. Some agencies keep hosting, licences or CMS access. Read the contract before signing, not after. | The code is usually yours, but documentation quality varies. Budget time for a handover review. |
| Best for | Founders and SMEs who want senior work on one defined product. | Brands that need design, build and marketing under one roof, or many hands at once. | Large builds where volume matters more than proximity, backed by strong technical management on your side. |
| Typical risk | Capacity. One person cannot parallelise, and the bus factor is one. Ask how they mitigate it. | Dilution. A senior wins the pitch; juniors may do the work. Cost per project is the highest of the three. | Communication gaps and rework. Cheap hours are not cheap if you buy them twice. |
Some rows genuinely favour the other models. That is the point of an honest table.
Ten questions to ask before you sign
Ask these of every agency you shortlist, including us. Good firms answer all ten without flinching.
- 01Who will actually write the code, and can I meet them before I sign?
- 02Can you name one client, with a before and after number, whom I can call to confirm it?
- 03What exactly does the quoted price exclude?
- 04If the scope changes mid-build, what happens to the price and the deadline?
- 05At handover, who owns the code, the domain, the hosting and every account password?
- 06What does support cost after launch, and what does it cover?
- 07How many other projects will run alongside mine?
- 08What has to be true for you to hit the go-live date you just quoted?
- 09Tell me about a project that went wrong. What did you do about it?
- 10If I leave you in a year, how painful is the exit?
How much does a website cost in Dubai?
Ranges vary widely. Digital Gravity's own FAQ puts typical Dubai website design at AED 10,000 to 50,000. The honest answer is that cost follows scope, so any figure quoted before discovery is a guess. We give a fixed AED quote after discovery, and most of our website builds take four to eight weeks.
How much does an app cost in Dubai?
DXB Apps' published FAQ puts UAE app builds between AED 150,000 and AED 1.5 million. Custom apps at large agencies do cost that. Our model is different: we scope a working version one, quote a fixed AED price after discovery, and deliver in four to ten weeks. Compare like for like before you compare prices.
Should I pay hourly or a fixed price?
Both models work when the incentives are visible. Clutch lists Dubai web agencies mostly at $25 to $99 per hour, with minimum projects from $5,000. Hourly suits open-ended work, but overruns land on you. We quote fixed AED prices after discovery because we would rather own the estimating risk than bill you for it.
Is a solo builder riskier than a big agency?
In one way, yes. A solo builder has no bench, so illness or overload hits harder than it would at a large firm. We manage that by never overbooking the studio and handing over full code ownership, so you are never trapped. Weigh that risk against paying for layers you may not need.
What should I check before signing with any agency?
Three things. First, who writes the code: meet them, not just the salesperson. Second, ownership: code, domain, hosting and every account should be yours at handover, in writing. Third, evidence: one named client with a before and after number that the client will confirm. Any agency that resists all three is telling you something.
Why would you talk yourself out of work?
Because wrong-fit projects fail slowly and expensively, for both sides. We only take work we can do well, and we keep our intake deliberately small to keep it that way. Turning away a poor fit costs us one invoice. Taking it would cost us the track record.