A boutique owner in Lagankhel pulls the shutter at eight and sits down with three notebooks and a phone. One notebook holds the day's sales. One holds udharo. The third is the tailor's job costs, and the phone holds four hundred WhatsApp messages, some of which are orders. Somewhere in that pile is the answer to a simple question: did the shop make money this month?
This post does one thing. It walks one imagined shop through one month and adds up, line by line, what Retriever saves in money and in hours. The figures for Retriever are the real ones. The figures for everything else are labelled assumptions, and you should cross them out and write your own.
The money ledger
What the software costs. Retriever has three plans, and the pricing page always carries the current figures. Free is NPR 0 and already has the counter, the bills and the khata, for the owner alone and up to 15 products. Plus is NPR 999 a month, or NPR 9,999 a year. Pro is NPR 2,999 a month, or NPR 29,999 a year. Our boutique has a few hundred pieces, one helper on Saturdays, and customers who want to order from the shop page, and all three of those are Plus. So this ledger uses Plus at the monthly price, NPR 999, with no yearly discount assumed. Every new shop gets 7 days of Pro first, then moves to Free unless it chooses a plan. We never take a commission, on any plan.
What a built website costs instead. Shops tell us they are quoted between NPR 15,000 and NPR 70,000 for a developer build. Take a middling NPR 40,000 project, add hosting, a domain and two rounds of changes, and over three years it lands somewhere near NPR 60,000, with nobody on call when it breaks. Retriever Plus on the yearly price over the same three years is NPR 29,997, about half, and the counter, the khata and the staff logins come with it. Pro over three years is NPR 89,997, which is more than that middling developer site, so if the website were the only thing you were buying, Pro would not be the cheaper route. That NPR 60,000 is a middling brochure. A developer asked to build the counter as well is quoting a different job, and what Retriever itself cost to build is about NPR 220,000 of labour so far, still climbing. The brochure working is in what a shop website costs in Nepal.
What a commission takes instead. Commission rates vary by platform and by contract, so use a round twenty per cent for a food aggregator and around twelve per cent for a marketplace's commission and fees, and correct both from your own statement. Give our boutique NPR 30,000 of monthly sales that would otherwise go through a marketplace. Twelve per cent of that is NPR 3,600, every month, taken off the top before costs. The rest of that assumed month is NPR 26,400 still in the till. On Retriever the commission line is NPR 0 on every plan, including Free. What your customer pays, you keep.
- You keepNPR 26,400
- 12% commission, assumedNPR 3,600
What the counter software costs instead. A till, a billing package and a credit ledger are usually three separate quotes with three separate renewals. On Retriever they are not separate products: the till, PAN and VAT bills, the khata and the day's closing are on every plan, Free included. Whatever your till vendor quoted you per year, that line deletes.
The SMS line. If you run offers or loyalty by SMS, the bill grows with every customer you add. Retriever's loyalty card, on Plus and Pro, lives in the customer's wallet app instead, so there is no SMS bill and no list to type twice.
Add the month up for our boutique: NPR 999 of software on Plus, against NPR 3,600 of commission kept and a till licence deleted. The shop is ahead before we count a single hour.
| Line | One month | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| Retriever Plus, monthly price | NPR 999 | Real |
| Marketplace commission, 12% of NPR 30,000 | NPR 3,600 | Assumed |
| Retriever commission | NPR 0 | Real |
The time ledger
Closing the day. The three-notebook evening is the slowest hour a shop has. Call it forty minutes of adding, and correct that from your own kitchen table. Retriever's counter closes the day in about two minutes: the drawer is counted against what the till already knows, and the difference is named.
Finding one udharo line. On paper, the question is not what Ram owes, it is where the page with Ram on it went. The digital khata answers by name, and the monthly settle-up is a filter, not an afternoon.
Orders out of the chat. A WhatsApp order is a message somewhere above four hundred others. On Retriever Plus an order is a card on a board that stays until it is done, so nobody scrolls, and nobody misses one that scrolled.
The tailor's book. The job costs move into the job book on Plus, against the customer they belong to.
The setup itself. Putting the shop online takes about five minutes, maybe eight on slow wifi, once your photos and prices are ready. The preparing is the real work; the software stops adding to it.
Call the evening sums, the khata hunting and the chat scrolling forty-five minutes a day, and a month gives you back over twenty hours. That is not a convenience. That is half a working week, every month, returned to the person the shop cannot run without.
The trade-offs, told straight
Plus is real money, and NPR 999 a month has to earn itself. In the ledger above it does, because that shop sells online, has a helper and runs a counter. A shop with one person and a short list can stop at Free and keep the counter and the khata for nothing. Pro, at NPR 2,999 a month, earns itself only if you need what it adds: your own domain, the message inbox, event tickets, unlimited products or full analytics. The counter runs on a phone or tablet you already own: get the Retriever app from the App Store or Google Play, or open it in the browser. A printer is optional: every sale has a digital receipt, on the shop's screen and in the customer's email and account. And every non-Retriever figure in this post is an assumption wearing a label, because your rent, your margins and your vendor quotes are yours.
If you want to check the sums against a real screen, walk through the demo shops, then start your own. The first 7 days are Pro, which is long enough to add the ledger up yourself and see which plan your shop actually uses.