FAQ

Questions people actually ask

Straight answers, including the ones that cost us work.

How much does a custom operations platform cost in the UAE?

Zypilot builds run from AED 12,000 for a standalone bilingual website to AED 140,000 for a regulated system of record. A focused build — one workflow done properly, or a client portal — is AED 40,000 to 56,000. The system a business runs its day on is AED 56,000 to 80,000. For comparison, Dubai agencies typically quote AED 250,000 to 600,000 for a mid-level business application, because you are also paying for an account manager, a project manager and a sales team.

What is paid discovery, and why do you charge for it?

Discovery is a two-week scoping sprint costing AED 15,000. It produces three things: a written specification of what gets built, a clickable prototype of your own system on your real screens, and a fixed price with a timeline. If you proceed, the full AED 15,000 comes off the build. If you decide not to, you keep the specification and the prototype and owe nothing further. It is charged because it is real work — most agencies in Dubai charge AED 15,000 to 50,000 for the same stage and rarely credit it back.

How long does a build take?

A standalone bilingual website takes one to two weeks. A focused build is two to four weeks. An operations platform is four to seven weeks. A regulated system of record — audit trails, access control, compliance gates — takes eight to fourteen weeks. Discovery adds two weeks at the front, and you see clickable weekly demos throughout rather than status emails.

Who owns the system and the data?

You do, completely. The system is deployed in your own cloud account, under your own domain, with your own database and file storage. Nothing is shared with another client. If you ever want to take it elsewhere or hand it to another developer, you can — there is no lock-in and no hostage data.

What does the AI actually cost to run?

AI usage is billed by Anthropic directly on your own account, at cost. Zypilot never marks up a token. A spend ceiling is agreed with you before anything goes live, so the bill cannot surprise you, and you get a monthly usage report explaining what drove it. Where an assistant is live there is a separate managed-AI fee for prompt tuning, quality review and guardrail maintenance — that pays for work, not for tokens.

Why not just buy off-the-shelf software?

Often you should, and Zypilot will say so on the first call. Off-the-shelf wins when your process is genuinely standard. It fails when the rule that matters to your business is the one the software will not enforce — a compliance gate that must block a deal, a freeze time a batch cannot skip, a partner who must never see your margin. Those are the jobs worth building, and they are the only ones worth this money.

Do you work with businesses outside the UAE?

Yes. Zypilot is based in Dubai and most clients are in the UAE, but systems are running for businesses operating in Sudan, the United Kingdom and across cross-border trade. What matters is whether the work is remote-deliverable, which it almost always is.

Can the system work in Arabic?

Yes, with full right-to-left layout throughout — navigation, forms, tables and reports mirrored properly, not a translation layer over a left-to-right design. Several live systems are Arabic-first rather than English-first, because that is what the people using them every day actually read.

Where is our data stored, and does it leave the country?

Storage location is chosen with you and can be pinned to a specific region. Be aware of one thing most vendors will not tell you: if your system calls a hosted AI model, that request leaves the country even when your database does not, and a regional endpoint does not always fix it because inference can be served globally. If you are under a data-residency obligation, get your compliance advisor to rule on processing as well as storage before anyone builds an AI feature.

What happens if I stop working with you?

You keep everything — the code, the database, the cloud accounts and the domain, all of which are already in your name. There is no proprietary runtime to license and nothing switches off. Ongoing support runs on a twelve-month minimum, but that covers hosting, monitoring and change-hours; it is not a licence to use your own system.

Something not answered here?

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