"How much does an app cost?" is the most-asked and worst-answered question in software. The honest answer is a range — and understanding why it's a range will save you more money than any discount.
The realistic ranges in Egypt (2026)
- A landing website or simple booking site — the entry level of custom work; days to a couple of weeks of effort.
- A business system (CRM, clinic manager, inventory) — the mid range; a focused build measured in weeks, not months.
- A multi-tenant SaaS platform with payments, roles and dashboards — the serious range; months of iterative development.
Egyptian development costs remain a fraction of US/EU agency rates, which is exactly why regional businesses that once bought foreign off-the-shelf software now commission custom builds locally.
What actually drives the price
Four things move the number more than anything else:
- Roles and permissions. One user type is cheap. Owner + manager + staff + customer portal quadruples the surface.
- Integrations. Payments (Paymob, Stripe), WhatsApp, SMS, maps — each is days of work done right.
- Bilingual Arabic/English with RTL. Retrofitting it later costs multiples of building it in from day one.
- Reports and dashboards. "Just a simple report" is never simple — but it's usually where the business value lives.
Where budgets get wasted
The classic mistake is paying for six months of silent development and receiving a big reveal that misses the point. The fix is structural, not contractual: demand a working first version fast, then iterate weekly on real feedback. That's how we build at Wizzora — our five SaaS products all started exactly this way.
Buy or build?
If a ready product covers 80% of your need, start there — a subscription beats a build you must maintain. Build custom when your workflow is genuinely different, or when the software is the business. Either way, the cheapest software is the one your team actually uses.