Every so often somebody asks us, straight out: why should I pick Retriever over everything else? It is a fair question, and because we built the thing, you should read this as the maker's own case, not a neutral review. We have been building it since early July. It costs more than a website, and it is still being built. Here is the case, in the plainest terms we can manage.
It is the most affordable way to run a real shop online
Retriever is Pro. A new shop opens on Pro with no card. Your shop, your catalog, your orders and your own link are part of that, not a separate free product.
Pro was NPR 2,000 a month as this was written, or NPR 1,500 a month billed yearly at NPR 18,000; the pricing page always carries the current figure. Pro exists to pay for the counter tools: the till, the khata, tickets, bookings, loyalty, the kitchen TV, staff, payslips and the books. Compare that with what a foreign website builder charges in dollars before you have taken a single order, and then add what a delivery aggregator takes from every sale, every day. Every new shop opens on Pro free for 7 days, and the price after that is the same for every shop.
More of the shop is already built
Most website tools give you pages and leave the actual shopkeeping to you. Retriever ships the parts a Nepali counter actually runs on:
- 24 designed templates, jewellers included, that read like real shops rather than themes
- QR ordering at the counter and on tables, with a live order board and a kitchen TV
- A till for walk-in sales, with barcode scanning, held bills and printed receipts
- Bookings for salons, restaurants and repair counters, confirmed by email
- A digital khata so regulars can buy on credit and settle up monthly
- Event tickets with QR codes scanned at the door
- Staff and payslips, so a Saturday cashier is not a second login you invent
- The accountant pack, figures you can download, not a second set of books
- Counter discounts, because haggling is how a counter works, shown honestly on the bill
- Cost prices and profit, so you know what you kept, not just what came in
- PAN and VAT receipts, printed or digital, Bikram Sambat dates, and Nepali alongside English
Nothing on that list is a plugin you hunt down and pay extra for. It is one product, wired together, and your data stays in one place.
Support that answers like a neighbour
When something confuses you on Retriever, you message and a person answers, usually the person who built the screen you are stuck on. There is no ticket number and no queue robot. The help centre is written in plain language with screenshots of the real dashboard, the dashboard has a help chat built in, and if the answer is missing we treat that as our bug, not yours.
What a thing like Retriever costs to build and to run
We can be specific about this, because it is our own bill. Two kinds of money go into a product like this one. There is what it costs to keep the lights on every month, and there is what it has cost to build so far. The second number has grown since we last wrote this down, which is the honest part.
The monthly bill, at list prices
These are the published prices of the services Retriever runs on, as this was written. They are billed in US dollars, which is its own small tax on a Nepali business: your bank charges you to pay them, and the figure moves with the exchange rate. Rupee figures below use roughly NPR 140 to the dollar.
- Database, sign-ins and file storage. Supabase is free until a real shop's traffic outgrows it, then USD 25 a month, about NPR 3,500.
- Hosting. Vercel's free tier is not licensed for a business, so a real shop is on USD 20 a month, about NPR 2,800.
- The domain. A .np address is free from Mercantile, which we wrote about in getting a domain in Nepal. A .com is NPR 1,500 to 2,500 a year. Call it NPR 200 a month at most, and nothing at all if you take the free one.
- The AI. Every answer the help chat gives is a paid call to a model. Ours costs a little over one US cent per answer, measured on our own test sweep of 68 questions, which comes to about a dollar. A shop asking five questions a day is a few rupees a day.
That is roughly NPR 6,500 a month before anybody has been paid to write a line of code, and it buys you an empty server. It is not a shop. It is the electricity.
| Line | About, one month | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| Database, sign-ins and files | NPR 3,500 | List price |
| Hosting | NPR 2,800 | List price |
| Domain | NPR 200 | Assumed |
| Empty server, before anyone is paid | NPR 6,500 | Sum |
- Database, sign-ins and filesNPR 3,500
- HostingNPR 2,800
- DomainNPR 200
What the building has cost, counted again
On 30 August we counted 272,000 lines, 126 migrations, fourteen services and eight weeks. That figure was already a floor. Counted again on 19 September 2026, from the same repository: 314,000 lines of code, 158 database migrations, 19 background services, 1,784 commits, and 77 steps in the release gate. The calendar from the first commit on 5 July is just under eleven weeks.
The database migrations are the part nobody sees and the part that takes the longest, because each one has to be written so it can never lose a shop's money.
We will be straight with you about why it moves this fast: a large amount of the typing is done by AI, with a person deciding every decision and reading every line. That is the honest version, and it is also why the AI line above is not a rounding error for us.
At NPR 80,000 a month for a competent full stack developer, which is the assumption we are making so you can redo the sum with your own figure, just under eleven weeks is about NPR 220,000 of labour. Treat that as a floor rather than a price. It is one person moving at a speed that tooling made possible, on a product they are still designing. A team quoting you the same scope from a standing start, without that leverage, is quoting months and a multiple of that number.
Then it keeps costing. A shop is not finished when it launches. Nepal changed its tax rules while we were building; the fiscal year rolls every Shrawan; eSewa and FonePay change their integrations; a bug found at somebody's counter on Saturday needs fixing on Saturday.
Which is the whole argument
Set that beside the price of Pro. NPR 18,000 for a year, or NPR 54,000 over three, against a build that has already passed NPR 220,000 before its hosting bill, and never stops needing somebody.
We are not saying do not hire a developer. If you need something genuinely yours, hire one, and read what a shop website actually costs first so you know the shape of the bill. A quote of NPR 15,000 to 70,000 is a website. The job we are still doing is the shop behind it. We are saying that the arithmetic is why a product like this exists at all: the build is paid for once, by us, and split across every shop that uses it.
The honest comparison
If you need a big custom web application, hire a developer. If you love spreadsheets and enjoy stitching five tools together, you can absolutely do that. But if you run a cafe, a boutique, a salon, a mart or an events crew in Nepal and you want the whole shop online this afternoon, priced in rupees, with someone to call when you are stuck, we built Retriever for exactly you, and we think it is the best value on the table.
See it for yourself: walk through the live demo shops, read what a website actually changes, and when you are ready, your shop is five minutes away.