A joinery firm in Sharjah laid two invoices on the same desk. The Dubai agency's quarterly bill was AED 6,400 plus 5% VAT and the description was "brand awareness". The Abu Dhabi freelancer's bill was smaller, but the "Book a site visit" button charged a Telr link registered to the freelancer's own trade licence. Settlements never reached the joiner. The Arabic landing page for Sharjah returned a 404 that nobody had opened in a browser.
UAE companies walk away from local retainers when the paperwork is cleaner than the handover. A nearby office is not the same thing as a named owner for the website, the ads, and the payment link.
What the VAT invoice hid
The agency PDF listed a month of "content" and a month of "boosting". It did not list the Abu Dhabi service page that still showed 2022 prices, or the fact that the Google Business Profile was created under an employee's personal Gmail. When the joiner asked for a call log, the reply was a screen recording of Instagram insights.
Procurement teams in Dubai see this often on fit-out, clinics, and trading companies. The VAT number is valid. The asset register is not.
Three ways to buy the same job
A local agency in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, or Sharjah typically asks AED 4,500–AED 9,500 a month before VAT. You get meetings in the same emirate and a shared producer. Specialists rotate. The person in the sales meeting is rarely the person who can edit the form.
A freelancer at AED 1,800–AED 3,800 is fast at one output: reels, or a landing page, or a campaign. The failure mode is custody. Telr, hosting, and the ad account live in their profile. A visa run becomes a missing checkout.
A scoped CrazzyCodes engagement separates design, search, and media into lines you can audit, and it puts the domain, analytics, and any Telr merchant account in the company's name. See how web design and search work are scoped, and how a retainer is written so finance can match it to a VAT invoice.
Handover questions worth asking
- Which trade licence owns the domain, hosting, and ad account?
- Is the Telr merchant ID yours, or the supplier's?
- Does the VAT invoice name the pages and campaigns?
- Are Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah pages written as different offers?
- Who answers if the form fails on a Friday afternoon?
- What files transfer if you end the month?
The estimate finance can sign
Ask for a single page: outcome, 90-day outputs, exclusions, login ownership, VAT, and the fee. If that page does not exist, you are buying availability, not a system. CrazzyCodes will mark gaps against your current invoice before proposing a number. You keep the accounts if you later stop.
Request the estimate on one page
Attach the last VAT invoice. We will answer with deliverables, exclusions, and who holds the logins.
Request a written estimate