Ask five Dubai agencies what social media costs and you'll get five different answers, none of them straight. Here are the actual bands, what sits inside each one, and how to tell whether you're being quoted fairly.
The four price bands in the UAE market
Pricing here clusters into four fairly predictable tiers. Where you land depends on three things: how many platforms you want, how much of the content is video, and whether ad management is included.
Under AED 3,500/month
This is the danger zone. At this level you are buying someone's spare hours - usually recycled stock content, captions written from a template, and no shooting. It can look busy and produce nothing. If this is genuinely your ceiling, don't hire an agency at all. Buy a good phone gimbal, pick one platform, and post twice a week yourself. You'll do better.
AED 3,500–8,000/month
A boutique studio or experienced freelancer. Expect one or two platforms, roughly 8–15 pieces of content a month, a real shoot day, basic community management and a monthly report. This band is where most UAE SMEs should be starting. It's also where we start, and we're deliberately at the bottom of it.
AED 8,000–20,000/month
A mid-size agency retainer. Three or four platforms, 15–25 pieces including reels and stories, active community management, and paid ad management on top of organic. Sensible if you already have proven demand and want to pour fuel on it.
AED 20,000+/month
Full-service. Multiple platforms, in-house-style production with proper photography and video crews, motion graphics, a dedicated strategist, and integrated paid media. Real value if you're a large brand with a real media budget. Enormous waste if you're a single showroom.
What actually drives the number up
Four things move price more than anything else, and it's worth knowing which of them you're paying for:
Video volume. A month of static graphics and a month of shot-and-edited reels are not the same product. Video is where the hours go, and it's also where the results are - so if a quote looks cheap, check how much of it involves a camera.
Platform count. Every additional platform adds reformatting, rescheduling and a separate comment queue. Two platforms done properly beats five done thinly, almost always.
Arabic. Fully bilingual campaigns typically add 20–40% because you're paying for a second writer, not a translation tool. Whether you need it depends entirely on who buys from you.
Ad spend management. Managing paid media is a separate skill and usually a separate line item. Make sure you know whether the ad budget itself is inside or outside the retainer - this is the single most common source of billing surprises in the UAE market.
Why the cheapest quote usually costs the most
The AED 1,500 reel is rarely a bargain. It's a reel that didn't get planned, didn't get lit, didn't get a second take, and won't get measured. You'll pay for it twice: once in cash, and again in the three months of audience attention you spent looking amateur. We've written separately about how to set a marketing budget you can actually sustain, because the sustainability of the number matters far more than its size.
The failure mode we see most often in Dubai isn't overspending. It's the sprint: three loud months, then silence, then a new agency, then repeat. Every restart throws away the compounding.
Red flags in a quote
Regardless of price band, walk away from any of these:
- A guaranteed number of followers. Nobody can promise this, and we've explained exactly why the guarantee is always a lie.
- A quote with no shoot day and no mention of where content comes from.
- "Unlimited revisions." It means either nobody expects to revise anything, or the price already assumes chaos. We include two rounds and say so.
- Ad spend blended into the retainer with no breakdown.
- No monthly report, or a report full of impressions and reach with no enquiry number.
The only number that tells you if it's working
Not followers. Not reach. Cost per qualified enquiry.
Work it backwards. If your average customer is worth AED 12,000 over a year, and you close one in five serious enquiries, then each enquiry is worth about AED 2,400 to you. A retainer of AED 5,000 that produces four qualified enquiries a month isn't a cost - it's the cheapest salesperson you've ever hired. The same AED 5,000 producing 40,000 views and zero enquiries is a donation.
Ask any agency you're considering to tell you, in advance, how they'll report that number. The ones who go quiet at that question have answered it.
What we charge, and why we say it out loud
Our retainers start at AED 3,500 a month. That's the bottom of the honest band, not a discount - it's what it costs to do one platform properly, with a real shoot, for a business that's still building. Bigger scopes cost more and we'll tell you the number before you ask twice. There's more detail on what's included in social media management and CRM and ads, and the awkward questions are answered plainly on our FAQ page.
If you want to sanity-check what you're currently paying for, run your own numbers first with our free 10-point social media checklist. If you fail more than three of the ten, the problem probably isn't your budget.