If three developers quote AED 15,000, AED 60,000 and AED 200,000 for the same brief, at least two of them are pricing a different project. Usually all three are.
The quote is priced on the specification, not the brief
A brief says what you want. A specification says what will be built, down to what happens when the payment gateway times out and who can see which records. The gap between those two documents is where the price range lives.
The cheapest quote is almost always the least specified. It is not dishonest; it is an estimate against assumptions that nobody wrote down, and those assumptions get corrected during the build, at your expense.
What actually drives the number
- Integrations. Each external system is a project of its own, with unknowable risk until someone tests it.
- User roles and permissions. One type of user is a form. Four types with different visibility is software.
- Data migration. Moving records is never as clean as it looks, and cleaning is the part nobody budgets.
- Edge cases. The refund, the partial delivery, the approval that skips a step. These are the requirements that arrive in month three.
- Who owns the infrastructure. Deployment, monitoring and backups either cost money or cost you an outage.
How to compare three proposals fairly
Ask all three to quote against the same written specification. If nobody has produced one, pay one of them to, which is the purpose of paid discovery. It costs a fraction of the build and makes the other quotes comparable.
Then compare on three things only: what they identified as the riskiest part, how they would de-risk it, and what happens to the code and accounts if you part ways. Price becomes meaningful after those, not before.
The question that reveals the most
Ask: what would make this project take twice as long as you estimated?
A team that has shipped will answer immediately and specifically, usually naming an integration or a data problem. A team that has not will say scope creep, which is a way of saying they have not thought about it.