Things we had to work out
We only write about what we learned by shipping something. No listicles, no reheated advice — if we did not hit it on a real build, it is not here.
These are working notes, not marketing. Each one is something we had to solve for a client and could not find written down anywhere — UAE VAT that changes with the unit type, landed cost that settles weeks after the container lands, Arabic text that quietly reverses your part numbers.
The rule is simple: if we did not hit it on a real build, it does not go here. That rules out most of what gets published about software in this region, and it is why there are four posts rather than forty.
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What property software has to know in the UAE that generic software does not
Post-dated cheques, Ejari, VAT that changes with the unit type, and rent caps set by an index. Imported software gets all four wrong, and the gap is where the admin hours go.
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Landed cost: the number most UAE importers are quietly getting wrong
If your cost per unit is the supplier invoice divided by quantity, you are pricing against a number that is 15–40% too low — and the error is not evenly spread across the shipment.
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Building Arabic software: six things that break, and none of them are translation
Translation is the easy half. The half that ships broken is layout direction, bidirectional text mangling your part numbers, and numerals nobody agreed on.
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What custom software actually costs in the UAE
What actually moves the number, how the quote works, and the honest cases where you should buy something off the shelf instead of calling us.
JD Software Solutions — a four-person software studio in the United Arab Emirates. We build the system, hand over the code, and stay on to run it.