I came back to Lebanon in May 2019. I'd been away for years โ passing through every couple of months, but never long enough to actually feel what running something from here requires. I was in the middle of building a SaaS product and figured I'd continue that work from home. Three weeks in, I had a very thorough education in what "from here" actually means.
None of what I found was new. That's the part that still gets me. These weren't problems that arrived with the 2019 crisis. They were the baseline โ the starting conditions before anything went wrong.
Power and internet: the basics
In most countries, infrastructure is background noise. You plug in, you connect, you work. In Lebanon in 2019, power cuts were not edge cases โ they were scheduled facts, supplemented by unscheduled ones. Internet connections were technically advertised at speeds that had no relationship to reality, delivered over infrastructure that felt like it predated the internet itself.
For someone running a SaaS business, this is not a minor inconvenience. It's a structural problem. You can't build software reliably on a connection that drops mid-deploy. You can't run a cloud product on infrastructure that goes dark on someone else's schedule.
The fix I landed on: don't rely on Lebanese infrastructure for anything critical. Servers in Europe or the US. Stable power, reliable uptime, predictable connectivity. My code runs on infrastructure that isn't subject to the EDL schedule. There's an obvious irony in building software "from Lebanon" where none of the critical infrastructure actually touches Lebanon โ but it works, and it's the first workaround you arrive at.
Payments: the Gulf detour
Anyone who's built a consumer product or a SaaS tool in the Western world knows how frictionless Stripe is. Create an account, wire up an API, accept payments the same day. Stripe doesn't work in Lebanon. Neither do most of the payment infrastructure options that developers elsewhere take for granted.
What you can use: Gulf-region payment gateways. They work. They also charge multiples of what Stripe charges โ typically 3โ5% per transaction versus Stripe's 2.9%, with setup costs and monthly minimums that don't exist elsewhere. You also need a corporate bank account in the Gulf to attach them to. That means incorporating there, maintaining those accounts, and navigating a banking relationship across borders every time you want to touch that money.
The problem is solved. The cost is real and ongoing. If you're pricing a SaaS product and haven't factored in Gulf gateway fees and currency conversion costs, you will discover them the hard way the first time you try to pay your server bill.
The cost of doing business
Technology services โ hosting, licensing, tools, anything priced in USD โ cost the same in Lebanon as they cost anywhere else. Servers don't get cheaper because the local economy contracted. Software licenses don't adjust for purchasing power. The raw materials of a tech business are globally priced, and you pay those global prices regardless of what the market around you looks like.
This creates a specific tension when selling to local clients. You're paying global input costs and trying to price for a market that increasingly benchmarks everything against crisis-era rates. The gap doesn't compress just because someone expects it to. It has to be explained, and explaining it is part of every proposal conversation.
The collapse as accelerant
I was back in 2019. The protests started in October that year. Banking restrictions followed. The lira began its fall. By 2021, most serious business was running on USD cash, with bank accounts that were technically accessible but practically frozen at exchange rates that bore no resemblance to reality.
For tech businesses specifically, this sharpened everything. Paying for global services requires hard currency. Receiving payment from local clients who can only transact in lira at artificial rates means every invoice involves a currency negotiation. You quote in USD. They ask if you'll take lira. At what rate. Today's rate or last month's. The one the government says or the one the market says. This is not an exceptional situation โ it's the standard conversation.
The businesses that got through it built hard-currency income streams: Gulf clients, diaspora clients, anything priced and paid in USD. The ones that stayed fully Lebanon-denominated had a harder time. That wasn't a judgment about ambition. It was structural reality, and the ones who understood it early made better decisions.
Lebanon's de facto dollarization is not an economic policy โ it's what businesses did to survive. The dollar didn't replace the lira by design. It replaced it by necessity, one transaction at a time.
The perception problem
Infrastructure you can route around. Payments you can solve with Gulf accounts. Currency risk you can manage by denominating in USD. This one is harder.
Some businesses in Lebanon โ not all, but enough โ don't have a working model for what software costs or why. The logic, when you unpack it: they can't hold software in their hands. They can't find it on a supermarket shelf. They can't benchmark it against anything tangible. So it either costs nothing, or it costs whatever feels reasonable, which is usually a number informed by no particular research.
Custom software is expensive because it requires skilled people, sustained time, and problem-solving that has no template. A piece of software built specifically for your business operations is not like buying a packaged tool. It's closer to commissioning something that doesn't exist yet. Nobody is surprised that a custom-built piece of machinery costs more than a catalogue item. Software is identical logic, just harder to see โ because you can't hold it.
This isn't universal. Plenty of Lebanese businesses understand exactly what they're paying for and why. But the perception gap exists often enough that it becomes a regular part of the job: explaining the value of the thing before you can have a sensible conversation about the price of it. You can call that a market education problem. It's also just sales.
The businesses that have been burned by cheap software โ delivered late, broken, abandoned by whoever built it โ usually arrive with a very different perspective. Experience is the most effective teacher. It's just an expensive curriculum.
Life goes on
I've described this setup to people outside Lebanon as having two jobs: the actual software work, and the overhead of doing that work from here. Every obstacle I've described has a solution. Some cost money. Some cost time. Some require maintaining relationships in other countries as part of normal operations. None of them are reasons to not build here.
What Lebanon also has: technically talented people who are dramatically underpriced relative to their quality, a business community that has learned to be adaptable in ways that comfortable markets never develop, and a diaspora network that gives local businesses reach they wouldn't otherwise have. The obstacles are real. So is the foundation.
Every problem has a solution. Sometimes the solution is more expensive than it should be. You price it in and move on.
