If you run ads from Egypt, the number in Ads Manager is not the number you actually pay. The real cost is buried in tax and FX, and most founders here never put a figure on it. I have. Here is what paying Facebook directly really costs, and how I get around it.
The tax trap
Facebook charges 14% VAT on your ad spend. The problem is you get no Egyptian tax invoice for it. No local invoice means you cannot record that spend as a deductible business expense, so you are buying ads with after-tax money and getting no relief.
It gets worse if you try to do it by the book. To declare a payment to a foreign company like Meta as an expense, the rules expect 20% withholding tax. You cannot withhold anything from Facebook, they just charge the card, so to stay compliant you pay that 20% yourself, on top. That is 14% plus 20% out of your own pocket, for spend you still cannot cleanly deduct.
So the "cheap" option of paying Facebook directly is the expensive one once your accountant looks at it.
The FX trap
A lot of people think switching the ad account to Egyptian pounds fixes the dollar problem. It does not. Meta still treats EGP ad spend as a foreign-currency transaction, so your bank takes around 3% FX on top. And it only runs on credit cards, which carry limits that cap how much you can spend in a month. If you are trying to scale, that ceiling alone is a wall.
Fawry is not free either
Paying through Fawry is the common workaround. It works, but it is a hassle and Fawry takes its own cut per transaction. You have traded one fee for another and added manual steps.
What I actually do
I run ad spend through a local intermediary that pays Meta on my behalf and issues a proper Egyptian VAT invoice for it. The one I use is ConvertedPay. The difference shows up where it matters, on the books:
- I get a local invoice, so the spend becomes a real deductible expense.
- The dollar payment is handled for me, so I skip the 3% FX and the credit-card limits.
- No Fawry runaround.
It is not free. They take a small fee, around 5%, plus the 14%. But put that next to the alternative: 14% plus 20% with no deduction, plus 3% FX, capped by your card limit. Paying about 5% plus 14% and keeping it deductible wins on the math every time, and it scales past the card ceiling.
My ConvertedPay link above is an affiliate link. I use them and would recommend them either way; it costs you nothing.
The short version
Paying Facebook directly from Egypt looks like the simplest option and is the most expensive one once tax and FX are counted. Run it through a local invoicing layer, keep your ad spend deductible, and stop paying the dollar tax twice.
I run operations, not a tax practice, so confirm the specifics with your accountant. But the structure above is the trap I see Egyptian founders fall into constantly.
If you want a P&L that reflects your real cost per order, and clean ad-spend invoicing behind it, book a call or get an ops audit.