How to Choose an IT Company in Nepal: Our 10-Point Checklist

The right IT company in Nepal is the one that can show you live products it built, tell you exactly who will write your code, and hand over everything you paid for when the job is done. That's it. A ranked list can't tell you any of that, because "best" depends on what you're building, what you can spend and how much risk you can live with.

So we won't give you a list of names. We'd be ranking people we compete with, and we'd be guessing anyway. What we can give you is the checklist we'd use ourselves if we were hiring a software team. It works on every company you meet, including us, and it still holds up after the friendly sales call is over.

Where to look before you start comparing

Start with neutral places and only then start judging. Review directories like Clutch and TechBehemoths list software companies with project write-ups and client reviews. Read the reviews themselves. A 4.9 rating with three vague comments tells you less than one long, specific review that mentions a problem and how it got fixed.

NASIT's member list is a reasonable place to find established firms in Kathmandu and outside the Valley. LinkedIn is useful for a different reason: it shows you the actual people. If a company says it has a team of senior engineers, you should be able to find some of them.

Referrals are still the strongest signal you'll get. Ask the shop owner next door or a friend who runs a business in Baneshwor who built their system. Then ask what went wrong. Everyone remembers the good parts. People are polite about vendors until you ask about the bad month.

Pick three to five companies. More than that and the calls start to blur together.

The checklist we'd use on any IT company in Nepal

Run every company on your shortlist through these ten questions. You don't need to be technical for any of them. You just need to ask, write down the answers, and notice who gets vague.

Is the portfolio deep, or just long? A wall of logos proves very little. A good portfolio entry explains the problem, the decisions made and what happened next. Our Fospox case study is an example of the shape to look for: an Australian part-time job-matching platform, an adaptive card-based job discovery design, location features for the Australian market, and an estimated 37% cut in search time that we're clear came from prototype testing. Ask every company what their role was, what was hard and what they'd do differently. If they can't answer, that's your answer.
Can you open their products yourself? Screenshots can be mocked up in an afternoon. A live URL can't. Ask for links and open them on your own phone, on Ncell or NTC data rather than office Wi-Fi. Go through the sign-up, see how long it takes to load, and check whether anything looks recently updated. Suchanaa, our Nepal opportunity hub for tenders, quotations, EOIs, vacancies and company directories, is the kind of public product you can poke at without asking anyone's permission.
Who will actually build it? Plenty of software companies in Kathmandu sell with senior people and deliver with juniors, or quietly subcontract part of the work. That isn't always bad, but you should know about it before you sign. Ask who your day-to-day contact is, who writes the code and who reviews it, whether anything is outsourced, and what happens if a key person leaves halfway through. A decent company will put those people on a call with you before you sign.
How do they run a project week to week? Good delivery is mostly boring: a short discovery phase, a written scope, working demos every week or two, a tracker you can see, and one named person who replies to your messages. If the plan is "we'll build it and show you at the end", we'd walk away. Ask how they handle changes too. Scope will shift, so what matters is whether changes get priced and agreed in writing or argued about later over Viber.
Do they take security seriously? This is where cheap projects quietly fail. Ask how passwords and customer data are stored, whether everything runs on HTTPS, how they keep libraries updated, and who can see things like API keys and database passwords. Ask whether backups exist and whether anyone has ever tried restoring one. If your product touches payments, eSewa or Khalti integrations, or personal records, push harder here. A team that builds its own security-focused products tends to have good habits already; that's the thinking behind our Beswas Mail and Beswas Chat.
Will you own the code, domain and accounts? This is the point people skip, and the one that hurts most later. Get it in writing that the source code is yours once paid for, that the domain sits in your name and your account, and that hosting, app store developer accounts, analytics and payment gateways are opened under your business rather than the vendor's. Plenty of owners only find out they can't switch vendors when they try, because someone else holds the keys.
What happens after launch? Launch day is when the real work starts. Software needs updates, monitoring, backups and the odd fix at a bad hour. Ask who hosts it and where, what response times they commit to, what a maintenance plan covers, and what it costs to get help at 9 p.m. on a Sunday during the Dashain rush. Ask what happens if you stop paying, too. You should keep a working copy of everything. Some studios, BESWAS included, run managed environments so you don't have to carry the whole stack; if you want that, get the responsibilities written down. If you'd rather host it yourself, make sure deployment is documented.
Does the contract follow milestones? A fair contract ties payments to delivered work rather than calendar dates, with clear acceptance criteria for each milestone and a process for changes. Be wary of a big upfront payment with nothing to look at until the end. Check what it says about intellectual property, confidentiality and ending things early, and have someone you trust read it before you sign. A lawyer is better.
Can you call their past clients? Ask for two or three references and actually phone them. Did the work arrive on time? How were problems handled? Would they hire the same company again? Did they get everything handed over? Try to get one client whose project is at least a year old. Anyone looks good in month one.
Is the price clear, and does the time zone work? Ask for a written estimate split into phases, with the assumptions listed and a line saying what isn't included. If one quote is far below the rest, it usually means missing scope rather than some clever efficiency. International clients should add two checks. Nepal Standard Time is UTC+5:45, so agree on the overlap hours and who covers them. And read their proposal and emails closely, because written English is how most of your project will actually run.

Scoring your shortlist

Once you've had the calls, give each company 0, 1 or 2 on every point. Zero means no real answer, one means a partial answer, two means a clear answer you could check. Don't bother averaging the totals. Treat any zero on ownership, security or the contract as a deal-breaker until it's fixed in writing, however good the rest looks.

Then ask yourself one more thing. After the call, do you understand your own project better than you did before? A good IT company in Nepal should leave your problem clearer and your invoice no bigger than it needs to be. If you walked out more confused, that tells you something too.

FAQ

What is the best IT company in Nepal?

There isn't one answer, and anyone who says otherwise is probably selling something. It depends on what you're building, your budget and your timeline. Compare a handful of companies on the same questions and pick the one that answers the hard ones most clearly.

How much does it cost to build software in Nepal?

It swings a lot with scope, design work and how much support you need after launch, so a single number would mislead you. Ask for a phased estimate with the assumptions written out. At BESWAS we scope each project separately and send a written estimate after a short call, broken into phases so you can start small.

Should I go with a small studio or a big IT company?

Neither wins by default. A bigger firm has more people to throw at a problem. A smaller studio usually means you talk directly to whoever is building your product. What matters more is who does the work and whether you own what they build.

What should the contract include?

Scope, milestones with acceptance criteria, a payment schedule, ownership of the code and accounts, confidentiality, a change process, support terms after launch and a clean way to exit. If any of those are missing, ask why.

Want to put us through it?

We're a small product studio in Harisiddhi, Lalitpur, and we'd honestly rather be judged on this checklist than on a ranking. If you're comparing options for an IT company in Nepal, get in touch and ask us all ten questions. We'll answer each one in writing.

Cover photo by Mapbox on Unsplash.