Search for what to charge for social media management in Dubai and you will find packages, ranges and confident monthly figures, most of them with no source and none of them built from your team's salaries. A competitor's price tells you what they charge. It says nothing about whether the same number would make you money, because you do not know their costs, their scope, or whether the account is quietly losing them money every month.
The method that holds up is the same one that works for any retainer: cost your real capacity, cost the scope in that capacity, then add the margin you intend to make. Social media has a few lines that are easy to forget, so it is worth going through them one at a time.
Start with what an hour of your team really costs
Take everyone who will touch the account: the strategist, the content creator or designer, the community manager, the account manager. For each, work out the fully loaded monthly cost, meaning salary plus visa, insurance, software and their share of rent. Then divide by the hours they are actually available to client work.
Available hours are not contracted hours. After leave, public holidays, internal meetings and admin, most people have somewhere around 60 to 70 percent of their contracted time to sell. Price against the full week and the loss is built in before the first post goes out.
Cost each part of the scope separately
A social media retainer is several services bundled together, and each one consumes capacity differently. List them, and estimate the hours each takes in a normal month:
- Platforms. Every extra platform is not just more posts. It is another set of formats, another comments feed and another row in the report. Two platforms is rarely twice the work of one, but it is never the same.
- Planning. The monthly calendar, the concepts and the client meeting to agree them.
- Content production. Copy, design, filming and editing, per post, including the rounds of amends you include.
- Community management. Replying to comments and messages every working day, and escalating anything sensitive. This is the line most often left out, and it runs every day of the month.
- Reporting. Pulling the numbers, writing the summary and presenting it. Usually most of a day.
- Account management. Calls, approvals, chasing feedback and the messages that arrive in the evening.
Write the scope for the client in deliverables: twelve posts, four short videos, one report, two rounds of amends. Keep the hours for yourself. The client is buying the output, not auditing your timesheets.
A worked example, in AED
The figures below are an illustration of the method, not market rates. Replace every number with your own.
Suppose a Dubai skincare brand wants Instagram and TikTok managed, and the blended cost of the people on the account works out at AED 150 per available hour. The month looks like this:
- Planning and the monthly calendar: 6 hours.
- Twelve feed posts at about 2.5 hours each, including two rounds of amends: 30 hours.
- Four short videos at about 5 hours each: 20 hours.
- Community management at an hour a working day: 22 hours.
- Monthly report: 6 hours.
- Account management, calls and approvals: 8 hours.
That is 92 hours, which costs AED 13,800 at AED 150 an hour. If the agency wants a 35 percent margin on the fee, the price is the cost divided by 0.65, which is about AED 21,230. Rounded to AED 21,500, the margin is just under 36 percent. If the agency is VAT registered, 5 percent VAT goes on top, so the invoice total would be AED 22,575.
Notice what the example makes visible. If the client asks for a third platform, you can see roughly what it adds. If they want to drop community management, you can see exactly what comes off. The price moves with the work, which is the only way it stays defensible.
Price ads management as its own line
Running paid social is a different job from organic content, with its own skills, its own reporting and its own risk. Price it separately, with its own hours: setting up campaigns, building audiences, checking performance through the month and reporting on spend.
Keep the media spend itself out of your fee. Either the client pays the platform directly on their own card and ad account, or you bill the spend as a separate line and say so on the invoice. Mixing spend into the management fee makes your margin impossible to see, and it makes a busy month with a big budget look like a price rise. Remember too that spend you rebill counts towards your taxable supplies for VAT, even though it is not your income.
The lines that eat the margin
Most social retainers that lose money do so in the same few places. Agree them in writing before the first month starts:
- Amends. Say how many rounds are included and what happens after that.
- Out of hours cover. A brand that expects replies at night or on weekends is buying a service level. Price it or decline it.
- Shoots. Filming days, talent and locations are production, not management. Quote them as projects.
- Arabic and English. Two languages means two sets of copy and two sets of checks, and should be costed that way.
- Reactive content. Trend posts and same day turnarounds consume capacity you cannot sell to anyone else.
Review the price on a schedule
Social scopes drift more than most. A new platform appears, the videos get longer, the client starts sending product shots on WhatsApp for same day posting. None of it is agreed and all of it is work.
Track the hours against the scope for the first two or three months, then compare. If the account is consistently taking 120 hours on a 92 hour price, you have the evidence for a conversation about scope or fee, rather than a feeling. Put the renewal date on the client record when you sign, and treat it as the moment the numbers get checked.
When you are ready to send the number, a clear quotation that lists each deliverable helps the client approve it and helps you hold the scope later. The free quotation generator on this site does that. Keep the signed quotation, the hours and the invoices against the same client record, and the review at renewal has something to look at.
