Engineering for UAE companies, without Dubai overheads
Free-zone startups and established UAE businesses both hit the same wall: Dubai engineering rates make a serious build expensive before it has proven anything. We are a team in Egypt, on your working day, building the same quality at a cost that leaves you runway.
The UAE market has two languages and more than one currency
A product built in Dubai serves a customer base that is genuinely mixed — Emirati, wider Arab, South Asian, European — often within a single company. Interfaces need Arabic and English on equal footing, and pricing frequently needs AED and USD side by side.
Products built on a single-language, single-currency assumption hit this at exactly the wrong moment: after launch, when adding a second language means touching every screen and adding a second currency means touching every number.
We build for that shape from the start, because our own product does the same thing. Two languages with correct right-to-left handling, currency treated as data rather than a hardcoded symbol, and time zones handled properly instead of assumed.
What working with us actually looks like
Every item here is something we built and still run ourselves — not a service line we have only read about.
One to two hours behind Dubai
Our week runs Sunday to Thursday and yours Monday to Friday, so from Monday to Thursday we share a working day with the whole afternoon overlapping. Close enough for same-day answers, far enough that we are not billing Dubai office rates for them.
Genuinely bilingual products
English and Arabic as equal citizens, not a primary and an afterthought. Right-to-left layout, mirrored navigation and Arabic typography that a native reader does not wince at.
Multi-currency from the start
A closed list of supported currencies, with the currency snapshotted onto every ledger row, so changing what you accept never relabels what was already paid. Decimal places come from the locale rather than a hardcoded two — the Kuwaiti dinar has three, and rounding it to cents loses a fils.
Cross-border contracting, plainly
Milestone invoicing across borders, a remote contract you can hand to your finance team, and no assumption that you are a mainland entity. If your free zone wants a document we have not produced before, we produce it — administration does not become the project.
Runway-aware scoping
For a startup between rounds, the right scope is the smallest one that proves the business. We push back on features that would look impressive in a deck and delay the answer.
Code that survives diligence
Tests, migrations, documented deployment and no secrets in the repository. Technical diligence in a raise is a bad time to discover how the last team worked.
Architecture that grows sideways
Multi-tenancy, quotas and per-customer branding designed in early, so a first enterprise client is a configuration rather than a rebuild.
Yours from day one
Source, infrastructure, accounts and runbooks in your ownership from day one — which is also what an investor expects to see.
How we start with a UAE client
The same sequence on every engagement, whatever the stack.
1. A call in your afternoon
English or Arabic. We would rather understand the business constraint than demonstrate a technology.
2. A scope sized to your runway
What to build first, what to defer, and what it costs. If the honest answer is a smaller project, that is the one we quote.
3. Build, then hand over cleanly
Your repository, your cloud accounts, your domain — with documentation that stands up to a technical reviewer.
Straight answers
The questions that actually come up on a first call.
No. We are in Giza, Egypt, and work with UAE clients remotely — which is a large part of why the cost works. We are one to two hours behind Dubai depending on the season, and our Sunday-to-Thursday week shares Monday to Thursday with yours, so the afternoons overlap and questions get answered the same working day.
Yes. We invoice cross-border on milestone terms and can supply what your finance side needs — a written scope, milestone invoices, and the entity paperwork your accountant asks for.
That depends far more on scope than on rate. The most useful thing we can do for an early-stage company is cut the build down to what actually tests the business, and that is how we will scope yours. We will tell you when something on your list should wait, even though it makes the invoice smaller.
That is a stated goal, not a hope. Tests in the pipeline, versioned migrations, documented deployment, no secrets in the repository, and a README that lets a new engineer run it locally on the first afternoon.
Building for the UAE market?
Send us the problem and your constraints — timeline, budget, runway. You get a written scope back, and an honest view on whether the timeline is real.
Every project starts with a scoping conversation and a written estimate before any code is written. No retainer required to talk.