How to Choose a Web Development Company in Nepal

Choosing a web development company is mostly a problem of asymmetric information. You are buying something you cannot inspect until it exists, from someone whose portfolio shows only the parts that went well. The questions below are the ones that reliably separate a team that will finish from a team that will disappear at eighty percent, and they work whether you are hiring in Kathmandu or from Sydney.

Start with how they scope, not how they price

A price quoted before a scope is a guess, and it is always a guess in their favour. What you want to see is a written scope: the pages or screens, the integrations, who supplies content, what is explicitly out, and what happens when something is added mid-build. A team that produces this before quoting has done the thinking; a team that emails a number the same afternoon has not.

• Ask what happens when the scope changes. "We will handle it" means you will argue about it in week six.
• Ask what they need from you and when. Content and approvals are the usual reason a project slips, and a good team says so up front.
• Ask for the assumptions behind the estimate in writing. Assumptions are where the disagreements live.
• Be suspicious of a quote that arrives without a single question being asked.

What a website actually costs in Nepal

Refusing to talk about money is a red flag on both sides of the table, so here are our own figures. A well-built marketing site for a small business starts around Rs 65,000 for Nepali clients, or about $900 for international ones, and takes three to five weeks. Software with logins, payments or dashboards starts around Rs 320,000 or $4,200 and runs six to twelve weeks. A dedicated offshore engineer is about $2,200 per month. Every one of those is a starting point against a written scope, not a quote, and our full pricing is published rather than negotiated in the dark.

The useful thing about published numbers is what they let you check. If someone quotes you Rs 15,000 for a custom site, they are reselling a template and the maintenance will cost you more than the build. If someone quotes Rs 900,000 for a brochure site, ask precisely what the extra work is. The middle is wide, and the honest answer to "how much" is always "it depends on scope", but a firm that will not put ranges in writing is telling you something.

Check the engineering, not just the visuals

Portfolios are screenshots. Open the live sites on your own phone, on mobile data, and see what happens. Then check the things a screenshot cannot show you.

• Run their own site and two client sites through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. A web company whose own site fails Core Web Vitals is telling you what they prioritise.
• View source. Is there a title and description, structured data, a sitemap at /sitemap.xml, and content in the HTML rather than assembled by JavaScript after the fact?
• Ask what happens on a mid-range Android phone on a slow connection, and see whether they have measured it or only assumed it.
• Ask who fixes a security patch eighteen months from now, and what that costs.
• Ask to see a repository, a staging environment, or a handover document from a previous project, with the client details removed.

Clarify ownership before you sign

This is the single most common way small businesses in Nepal get trapped. The domain is registered in the agency's name, the hosting is on the agency's reseller account, the code is on the agency's server, and the relationship is now permanent regardless of how it is going. Fixing it later means either paying whatever is asked or rebuilding from scratch.

Ask, in writing, before money changes hands: whose name is on the domain registration, whose account holds the hosting, where the source code lives and who has access, who owns the intellectual property once the invoice is paid, and what the exit looks like if you want to move to another team. The correct answers are yours, yours, a repository you control, you, and a documented handover with no penalty.

Rebuild or refactor what you already have

If you already have a site, the honest first question is whether it needs replacing at all. Rebuilding is satisfying and frequently unnecessary, and a rebuild resets whatever search equity the old site had earned. Refactor when the information architecture is sound and the problems are contained: slow images, a bloated theme, a dated visual layer, missing structured data. Those are weeks of work, not months, and they keep your rankings intact.

• Refactor when the URL structure still makes sense, the content is broadly right, and the complaints are about speed, appearance or one broken flow.
• Rebuild when the platform is unsupported or insecure, when nobody can safely change the code, when the structure fights every new requirement, or when the business it was built for no longer exists in that form.
• Never rebuild to change a colour scheme, or because a new framework is fashionable, or because the incoming team finds the old code distasteful.
• Whichever you choose, plan the redirects first. Losing rankings in a rebuild is avoidable and common, and site migration without losing traffic covers how.

Working with a Nepali team from abroad

If you are hiring from Australia, the US, the UK or the Gulf, the technical questions are the easy part. The ones that decide whether it works are commercial and practical: a contract your own lawyer recognises, IP assigned to you on payment, an NDA signed before the first call, invoicing in your currency through a route your finance team accepts, and a guaranteed daily overlap window with your working hours so decisions do not sit in a time zone gap for a day at a time.

Ask how many hours of overlap you get and on which days, because Nepal runs a Sunday-to-Friday week and the Saturday holiday catches people out. Ask which national holidays close the office, since Dashain and Tihar remove a meaningful block of days each autumn and any honest team plans around it rather than pretending otherwise. We cover the rest of this in why international teams outsource to Nepal.

Questions that reveal more than a portfolio

• "Tell me about a project that went badly and what you changed afterwards." Everyone has one. Only some will say so.
• "What would you talk me out of?" A team that has never talked a client out of anything is selling, not advising.
• "Who specifically will write this code, and what else are they on?" Agencies sell with seniors and deliver with juniors.
• "What does month thirteen look like?" Support, hosting, updates and the cost of each.
• "What do you need from me to hit the date?" The answer tells you whether they have run a real project before.

The cheapest quote and the most expensive quote are usually both wrong for the same reason: neither one is attached to a written scope.

What good looks like at handover

A finished project should leave you holding everything you need to walk away. That means the code in a repository under your account, the domain and DNS in your name, hosting on your own billing, design files you can open, analytics and Search Console connected and verified to your email, written documentation for the things a non-technical person has to do, and a recorded walkthrough. If a team resists any part of that, the resistance is the answer.

You can see how we structure the work on our web development service page, and what it looks like in practice in the Travellers Hub case study.