How much does a website cost in Iraq?

A website in Iraq costs anywhere from about $25 to $4,500 and up. At the bottom is a ready-made template. A small portfolio runs around $500, a company site around $1,000 to $2,000, and an online store around $4,500 and up. Most of the gap comes down to two things: how many people work on the site, and for how long.

The last four rows come from our own work. Website quotes we've given Iraqi clients have run from $500 to $4,500. This is a record of those jobs, not a price list. We don't have one, because the next job won't be the same as the last.

The first row is what's out there. We've seen a website offered for $25, which wouldn't buy our team's coffee. Public price pages aimed at Iraqi buyers, checked this November, start at around 150,000 dinars and $270. Some list simple sites at $800 to $1,000 and large ones at $5,000 to $10,000 or more.

Why one website costs nine times another

Time and people. Our $500 portfolio took one person about a week. Our $4,500 store took about three people about six weeks. Two quotes can both say "website" and describe different amounts of work, so ask each company what's included and who will do it.

What moves the price

What the site is for comes first. A portfolio has to look right. A landing page for one project has one job, and it can stop when the project does. A store has to take an order at 2 a.m. and not lose it.

Design is its own line. A template costs almost nothing because nobody designed it for you. Design made for your business is someone's time.

Content is another line, and it's the whole difference between our $1,000 and $2,000 company sites. If you bring good words and photos, you pay less. No layout rescues a dark photo of the storeroom.

Integrations add work each time the site connects to something else: payment, delivery, booking, a form that lands in the right sheet. Each one has to be built, tested and kept working. For Next Generation Doctors, a conference for doctors in Iraq, the website came with registration and QR check-in at the door.

What it costs after launch

A website keeps costing money. Budget $100 to $500 a year, about 170,000 to 850,000 dinars, for the domain, hosting and upkeep. A small site with little to look after can cost less. Where you land depends on how much maintenance it needs, how much data it stores and how fast it has to be. One Baghdad company lists a .com domain at 25,000 dinars and a .com.iq at 75,000. Ask for the yearly number before you sign, because a cheap quote that leaves it out isn't cheap.

What a cheap website costs you later

We've seen each of these with Iraqi businesses.

You get the same site as everyone else. A template a billion other people use, or worse, AI slop that went live without anyone reading it. Your customers can't tell you apart from the shop next door.

You can't get in. The designer holds the domain, the hosting and the logins, then disappears or charges to hand them over. Ask for them in your name. We hand ours over whenever a client asks.

Nobody can edit it. Changing a price or a phone number means tracking down the person who built it, so the site stays wrong. Settle who edits what, and what it costs, before work starts. We agree that upfront: some sites get an admin panel, and on others we make the changes.

The Arabic is broken. A template built for English gives you text running the wrong way, bad fonts and copy from a machine translation. Your customers read Arabic, so they notice on the first line.

No customers come from it. The site exists, it looks fine, and nobody has ever messaged you from it, because nothing sends people there and the sale still happens on WhatsApp. On the Trova Horizon launch, every link to the site carried a tag naming the video it came from, so each lead could be traced to the Reel that brought them in.

The real price of a website shows up the first time you need to change it.

When you don't need a website yet

If you run a tiny shop and your orders come from people walking past, a website won't change that. If you have a small Instagram page, the money may do more somewhere else, on better photos, say, or more stock. In both cases, wait. We'd rather tell you that than sell you a site nobody visits.

It's time when your staff answer the same questions all day and a page could answer them. It's time when you're paying for ads and need somewhere to send people and see what worked. And it's time when customers or partners who don't know you need a place to check that you're real.