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 is still being built. Here is the case, in the plainest terms we can manage.
Three plans, and the first one is free
Retriever has three plans, priced in rupees, with no commission on any of them and nothing that renews by itself. The pricing page always carries the current figures; these are the figures as this was updated in November 2026.
- Free, NPR 0. The counter and till, stock, bills and receipts with your PAN or VAT number, customers, returns, the khata, expenses, sales summaries, and a shop page with a WhatsApp order button. 15 products, drafts included, and the owner only.
- Plus, NPR 999 a month or NPR 9,999 a year. 500 products, three staff with their own till PIN, orders on your shop page for pickup or delivery, tables and table QR ordering, the kitchen screen, bookings, repairs, suppliers, payroll and payslips, IRD reports, loyalty and promo codes.
- Pro, NPR 2,999 a month or NPR 29,999 a year, about NPR 2,500 a month on the year. Unlimited products, event tickets and the door scanner, the Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp inbox, your own domain, no Retriever badge, staff permissions, full analytics, and product writing from a photo.
Every new shop gets 7 days of Pro, then moves to Free unless you choose a plan. Nothing is deleted when it does. 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.
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, and each line below says which plan it starts on:
- 30 designed templates, jewellers included, that read like real shops rather than themes (every plan)
- A till for walk-in sales, with barcode scanning, held bills and receipts (Free)
- A digital khata so regulars can buy on credit and settle up monthly (Free)
- PAN and VAT receipts, printed or digital, Bikram Sambat dates, and Nepali alongside English (Free)
- Counter discounts, because haggling is how a counter works, shown honestly on the bill (Free)
- Sales summaries on Free, and IRD reports to hand your accountant on Plus
- QR ordering on tables, with a live order board and a kitchen screen (Plus)
- Bookings for salons, restaurants and repair counters, confirmed by email (Plus)
- Staff and payslips, so a Saturday cashier is not a second login you invent (Plus)
- Event tickets with QR codes scanned at the door (Pro)
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 Zuno, a help chat, on every plan, 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 monthly bill, at list prices
These are the published prices of the services Retriever runs on, as this was written in September. 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, billed per answer. It is small for one question and never zero, which is why each plan has a daily number of Zuno questions. We leave it out of the sum below rather than guess a monthly figure for your shop.
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 plans. Plus is NPR 9,999 for a year, or NPR 29,997 over three. Pro is NPR 29,999 for a year, or NPR 89,997 over three. Both sit under a build that has already passed NPR 220,000 before its hosting bill, and that never stops needing somebody. And the counter, the bills and the khata cost nothing at all on Free.
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. And Pro is not the cheapest way onto the internet: a shop that only wants a page with a phone number can have that on Free, or from a developer once. 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. Start on the plan your counter actually needs, which for many shops is Free or Plus, 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.