What software development actually costs in Egypt (2026)

Ask ten agencies in Cairo what an e-commerce build costs and you will get ten answers spanning an order of magnitude, all of them delivered only after a discovery call. There is a reason for that: publishing numbers makes you comparable, and most vendors would rather be evaluated on a slide deck than on a price.

I think that is bad for buyers and, honestly, bad for good vendors too, because the current market rewards whoever is willing to quote lowest and explain least. So here are the numbers I actually use when I scope work, along with the reasoning, so you can push back on a quote instead of guessing.

Who you are buying from changes everything

Before any project number means anything, you have to know which of four markets you are shopping in. They are not the same market and comparing quotes across them is meaningless.

The multiplier is against the ranges further down, which are set at the small-shop-to-agency midpoint. A quote at 0.3× is not a bargain on the same product; it is a different product.

Hourly and daily rates

Fixed-price quotes are built out of these, so it is worth knowing them even if you never buy by the hour.

Two notes. First, engineers who work for foreign clients price against foreign rates, and the good ones increasingly do, so the top of the senior band is real, not aspirational. Second, an agency blended rate averages a senior architect and three juniors into one number; ask who is actually on your project and for what share of the hours.

Cost by project type

Build-to-launch, Egypt-based team, mid-market tier. Add the tier multiplier above.

What actually drives the number up

In rough order of how often these blow up a budget in practice:

1. Payments. Integrating a gateway properly, with webhooks, idempotency, reconciliation, refunds and failure states, is 3 to 8 developer-days per gateway. Split payments or deposits multiply that. This is consistently underestimated by everyone, including vendors.
2. Roles and permissions. "Admins can do everything" is a week. Four roles with overlapping, per-object permissions is a month, and it touches every screen you have already built.
3. Arabic and RTL. Bilingual is not a translation file. Right-to-left layout affects every component, every icon direction, every date and number format. Budget 15–25% on top of front-end work if it is not designed in from day one.
4. Integrations with systems you do not control. ERPs, shipping providers, government portals, a bank. Timeline risk here is not proportional to complexity; it is proportional to how responsive the other party's technical team is.
5. Real-time anything. Live tracking, chat, presence, collaborative editing. Each moves you from a request/response system to a stateful one, with a corresponding jump in infrastructure and testing cost.
6. Data migration. Moving ten years of messy records out of an old system is frequently more expensive than building the new system's core features. Nobody scopes it until it is late.
7. Compliance. If you handle payments or personal data at scale, security and data-protection requirements are engineering work, not paperwork. I wrote about what that actually involves in Egypt.
8. Design iteration. Not the first design, the fourth. Fix a design approval process in the contract or it will quietly consume a month.

What "cheap" gets you

When a quote comes in at a third of the others, it is almost never because that vendor found a clever efficiency. It is because a list of things is not in the quote. Usually this list:

• No automated tests. Every future change carries a risk of breaking something already paid for. This is the single biggest driver of "why does every small change cost so much now?" two years later.
• No infrastructure work. Deployed manually to one server, no staging environment, no backups tested, no monitoring. It works until the day it doesn't, and then nobody knows why.
• No security review. Default credentials, permissive object access, secrets committed to the repository, missing rate limits. All invisible at handover.
• No error handling on the unhappy path. The demo works. Payment timeouts, partial failures, and duplicate submissions do not.
• No documentation or handover. When that team becomes unavailable, the next team quotes you a rewrite, and they are usually right to.
• No accessibility, no performance budget, no SEO. Each one is cheap to design in and expensive to retrofit.

None of this makes cheap wrong. If you are validating an idea and fully expect to throw the code away in six months, cheap and fast is the correct commercial decision, as long as you know that is what you bought. The failure mode is buying disposable software and then trying to build a company on it.

The costs that start after launch

Launch is roughly 60–70% of the two-year cost of a system. The rest is:

If a proposal does not mention running costs at all, the vendor is either inexperienced or is deliberately keeping your attention on the build number. Both are worth knowing.

How to buy well

1. Pay for a scoping phase separately. Two to five days, priced, delivering a written scope, architecture sketch and a real estimate. It is the cheapest risk reduction available, and it lets you change vendor before you are committed.
2. Ask what is excluded, in writing. Not what is included; vendors are good at that list. Excluded.
3. Insist the code and infrastructure are in your accounts from day one. Your GitHub organisation, your cloud account, your domain. If a vendor resists this, that is the whole answer.
4. Tie payments to demonstrable milestones, not calendar dates or percentages of elapsed time.
5. Budget 20% contingency. Every project has surprises. A project with contingency has decisions; a project without contingency has fights.
6. Get one independent technical review before you sign anything above roughly half a million pounds. A day of senior review against a six-month build is cheap insurance and routinely changes the shape of the project.

And a note on the thing everybody asks about: quoting an offshore build against a local one. Egyptian rates are genuinely competitive internationally, but the reason to hire locally is not price: it is timezone, language, ability to sit in the same room when something is on fire, and understanding of local payments and regulation. If you are buying purely on rate, you will get what rate buys.