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 Pasal saves in money and in hours. The figures for Pasal 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. Pasal's Free plan is NPR 0, forever, for a shop of up to 20 products, with unlimited orders and no commission on anything. Pro was NPR 2,000 a month as this was written, or NPR 18,000 a year, which works out at NPR 1,500 a month; the pricing page always carries the current figure. Every new shop opens on Pro free for 90 days, so the first quarter of this ledger costs nothing at all.
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. Pasal Pro annual over the same three years is NPR 54,000, and the shop, the counter and the khata come with it. The full 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. On Pasal the commission line is NPR 0 on every plan, including Free. What your customer pays, you keep.
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 Pasal they are not separate products: the till, PAN and VAT bills, the khata and the day's closing all sit inside the same Pro price already counted above. 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. Pasal's loyalty card 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 1,500 of software on the annual price, against NPR 3,600 of commission kept and a till licence deleted. The shop is ahead before we count a single hour.
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. Pasal'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 Pasal an order is a card on a board that stays until it is done, so nobody scrolls, and nobody misses one that scrolled.
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
Pro is real money, and NPR 2,000 a month has to earn itself. In the ledger above it does, but only because that shop sells online and runs a counter; a shop that does neither should sit on the Free plan and pay nothing. The counter runs on a phone or tablet you already own, and a printer is optional: every sale has a digital receipt, on the shop's screen and in the customer's email and account. The Free plan stops at 20 products, and nothing breaks at the cap; the twenty-first simply asks you about Pro. And every non-Pasal 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 90 days are on us, which is three months of ledger you can add up yourself.