What a website actually costs in Nepal.

Because “a website” is not one product. The phrase covers a five-page brochure site and a booking platform with payments and inventory, and the work behind them differs by an order of magnitude. Any single figure quoted for both would be wrong for both.

What you can know in advance is what moves the number. Once you understand that, you can shape the scope to fit your budget instead of negotiating blind, and you can tell whether a quote reflects the work or just a guess about the client.

Almost all of the variance in a web project quote comes from six things. Understanding them lets you move the price deliberately instead of negotiating blind.

• Page count, but only up to a point. Twelve pages that share three templates cost barely more than eight. Twelve pages that each need their own layout cost roughly twelve times one.
• Whether the design is original or adapted. A custom design starts with research, wireframes, and revisions. A well-chosen template skips most of that, and for a great many businesses that is the right trade.
• Content. Who writes the words and sources the photographs is the single most common cause of both budget overrun and delay. If it is us, that is real work and it belongs on the quote. If it is you, the project needs a date by which it arrives.
• Integrations. Payments through eSewa, Khalti, or Fonepay, a delivery partner, an accounting system, a CRM, an SMS gateway. Each one is a discrete piece of engineering with its own testing and its own failure modes.
• Whether anyone logs in. The moment a site has accounts, roles, or a dashboard, it stops being a website and becomes an application. This is the largest single step change in cost on the list.
• Admin control. A site whose text you can edit yourself costs more to build than one where you email us for changes, and less to own. Which is cheaper depends entirely on how often you change things.

A website is a subscription pretending to be a purchase. The build is the largest single payment and the smallest share of the ten-year cost. Budget for the following every year, from the first year.

• The domain. Register it in your own name, not the agency’s. A .com.np requires documentation through Mercantile.
• Hosting. Shared hosting is adequate for a brochure site, not for e-commerce. A VPS or managed hosting is needed once traffic or a database is real.
• An SSL certificate. Let’s Encrypt covers a normal site, so do not pay extra for this.
• Maintenance and updates: security patches, backups, plugin updates, and small edits.
• Email hosting, usually Google Workspace or Zoho, billed per mailbox.

The maintenance line is the one most often skipped, and skipping it is how a site that was expensive to build becomes unusable in two years. An unpatched content-management install is compromised eventually, not hypothetically, and cleaning up a defaced or blacklisted site costs more than the year of maintenance would have.

Own your own accounts

Register the domain in your business’s name and keep the login. Own the hosting account, the Google Analytics property, the Search Console property, and the Business Profile. Agencies who hold these on your behalf, whether by policy or by accident, are holding the only assets in the project that genuinely appreciate. Any reputable partner will hand them over without being asked twice.

You will be offered a website for a small fraction of what a proper build costs, and it is not a scam. It is a real deliverable with real limits, and for some businesses it is genuinely the correct choice. It is worth knowing precisely what the limits are.

• A purchased template, applied with minimal changes. Recognisable to anyone who has seen the theme before, which increasingly includes your customers.
• Your content pasted in, unedited. Whatever you send is what appears.
• A page-builder plugin stack, which typically means several hundred kilobytes of JavaScript to render text, and a Core Web Vitals assessment that fails on mobile.
• No structured data, generic titles, and no redirect map, so search visibility starts near zero and stays there.
• No maintenance, which means the install is unpatched from the month it launches.
• And, most often, no handover of the domain or hosting credentials.

If you need a presence this month so that a Google search for your business name returns something you control, that is a reasonable purchase. If you expect the site to bring you customers, you are buying the wrong thing, and the rebuild in eighteen months will cost more than doing it once.

Most quotes are impossible to compare because each agency has silently assumed a different scope. You can fix that in a single page. Send the same page to everyone.

1. 1State what the site is for in one sentence, in terms of an outcome rather than a feature. “Take table bookings without phone calls” is a brief. “A modern, responsive website” is not.
2. 2List the pages you believe you need. Being wrong is fine, it gives everyone something concrete to correct.
3. 3Say explicitly who is writing the text and who is supplying photographs, and by when.
4. 4Name every integration: which payment gateway, which delivery partner, which accounting or inventory system.
5. 5Say whether anyone needs to log in, and what they do once they have.
6. 6State who will edit the site after launch, and how often.
7. 7Give your budget range. Withholding it wastes everybody’s time, and a good agency will tell you what is achievable inside it rather than quietly padding to whatever you eventually reveal.
8. 8Ask each quote to itemise design, development, content, integrations, and the first year of hosting and maintenance separately.

Nearly every project is constrained. When ours are, this is the order we argue for, and it is deliberately unfashionable.

1. 1Speed and mobile rendering. Nothing else matters if the page does not load on a mid-range phone on mobile data.
2. 2The three or four pages that carry the commercial weight, written properly. A great services page beats nine thin ones.
3. 3Working contact routes: a form that actually delivers, a phone number that rings, and a visible address.
4. 4Search foundations: titles, descriptions, structured data, sitemap, and the redirect map. These are cheap and permanent.
5. 5The ability to edit your own content, so the site does not calcify the week we leave.
6. 6Original design, animation, and photography. This is genuinely valuable and it is genuinely the thing to defer, because it is the only item on the list you can add later without rebuilding anything.