How much does a website cost in Lebanon, and what should it include?

What you are actually buying

Website quotes here vary enormously, and mostly for the same reason they do anywhere: "a website" describes jobs that differ by an order of magnitude and get the same name.

Broadly, three tiers:

A small brochure site. A few pages — who you are, what you offer, hours, location, contact. Priced at the lower end. For a great many small businesses this is genuinely all that is needed, and spending more buys nothing that earns.

A custom build. Designed for your business rather than assembled from a theme, usually with something functional in it — bookings, an enquiry system, a menu that you update. Middle of the range and where most serious small-business work sits.

A larger build with commerce or several integrations. Ordering, payments, delivery logic, multiple languages done properly. Top of the range, and worth it only when the thing it enables actually earns.

Prices are typically quoted and paid in fresh dollars. Agree the currency and the payment schedule in writing before work starts — not because anyone is untrustworthy, but because "we said dollars" has meant different things to different people here.

The Arabic question, which changes the price

A site that genuinely works in Arabic is not the same job as one with translated text pasted in.

Real Arabic support means the layout mirrors — navigation, arrows, alignment, form fields, all of it — and the typography is chosen for Arabic rather than inherited from the Latin design. Done properly it is more work and it should cost more.

Done improperly you get an Arabic page that reads left to right with broken spacing, which is worse than not offering Arabic at all. Ask to see an existing Arabic site the developer has built. This is the single fastest way to tell a serious quote from an optimistic one.

What belongs in every quote, at any price

• Your domain, registered in your name. Not the developer's, not the agency's.
• The source files, or a written licence to keep using the site.
• Hosting arranged so you know where it is and who is paying.
• A site that works properly on a phone, since that is where nearly all of your traffic will come from.
• Text as real text — especially menus and price lists. A price list as a JPEG cannot be found by search and cannot be read aloud by anything.

A quote missing these is not cheaper. It is smaller, and the gap shows up later.

The question that decides your real cost

What does it cost me to change something, and how long does it take?

A price change, a new dish, holiday hours. Call it twenty small changes a year. If each one goes through a developer, that recurring cost quickly overtakes whatever you saved on the build. If you can do it yourself, it is zero, permanently.

This is why a cheaper site you cannot edit is frequently the more expensive choice by the second year — and why it is worth asking about before comparing headline numbers.

Paying for it from Lebanon

Worth saying plainly, because it is a real obstacle here and most providers stay quiet about it: paying an overseas supplier from a Lebanese account is often the hardest part of the whole process, and it stops projects that everyone had already agreed on.

We take Whish, bank transfer and OMT Pay, among others. If the method you need is not on that list, get in touch and we will almost certainly find one that works — this is a solved problem and it should not be the reason you delay a decision.

Before you pay a deposit

Settle three things in writing: who owns the domain, what happens if you stop working together, and what a change costs. None of them is awkward to ask early. All of them are awkward to resolve late.

Paying an overseas supplier, and why it stalls projects

The point above about paying from Lebanon is worth expanding, because it is where a surprising number of projects quietly die.

You agree a scope. You agree a price. Then the supplier can only take an international card, or a wire your bank makes difficult. The work never starts. Nobody calls it a failure — it simply does not happen.

It is a fair thing to raise in the first conversation, alongside the three questions this article ends on. Helm is in London and Beirut and takes Whish, bank transfer or OMT Pay for exactly this reason. And the build is quoted once: content changes afterwards are yours to make from a dashboard rather than something you pay for each time, which is what actually decides your cost over three years rather than three months.