Google Workspace for schools and colleges in Nepal

Which route applies to your institution

Work out your route before you plan anything else, because the two paths differ in cost, in who you apply to and in how long it takes.

Route one: Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals

Education Fundamentals is free for qualified institutions. Google's stated qualification is a government-recognised, accredited educational institution, which means primary and secondary schools and higher education institutions that award degrees, with an active website.

Google is explicit about who does not qualify. Tutoring centres, MOOCs, corporate training providers, language schools and research institutes are not eligible. A coaching institute in Nepal reads as a tutoring centre in Google's terms, so it should plan on the business route rather than waiting on an application.

What a qualified institution gets

• A new domain is granted 2,500 licences, which is enough for most schools and campuses in Nepal to cover both staff and students.
• Storage is pooled across the institution, with a baseline of 100 TB for Education Fundamentals and Education Standard.
• Approval typically takes about 14 business days, so apply well before the academic session you are planning around.

Above Fundamentals, Google sells Education Standard and Education Plus, with Teaching and Learning available as an add-on. Those paid editions also change the storage position: Teaching and Learning adds 100 GB per licence and Education Plus adds 20 GB per licence to the institution's pool. Google's own pages are the place to check the current feature split and the prices for the paid Education editions.

Route two: business editions for everyone else

If you do not qualify, or you would rather not wait on an application, the Business editions are the practical answer. The difference is that they are priced per user, which changes how you plan accounts.

Most private institutes on this route license staff only: the principal, the administrative team, the accounts office and the teaching staff. Students get access to classes and shared material through Meet links and shared files rather than through their own paid accounts. That keeps the licence count in the tens rather than the hundreds.

Through WebsNP, Business Starter is $2.78 per user per month, billed yearly at $25.83 per user. A training institute with 12 staff accounts on Starter is $309.93 for the year. The same 12 staff on Business Standard, which adds meeting recording and much more storage, is $572.19. Invoices are in rupees and the accounts sit in your own Google Admin console.

Buying from Google directly means paying in US dollars or euros by card, because Nepali rupees are not one of Google's billing currencies and Google points customers to a local reseller where a local payment method is not offered.

Online classes: what each business edition can do

The edition decides the size and the shape of a class you can run in Meet.

Two of those rows decide plans in practice. Recording is the reason most institutes move to Business Standard, because a recorded class is the answer to a student who missed it and to a parent who wants to know what was taught. Attendance tracking is a Business Plus feature, so if you intend to take register from the call itself rather than by hand, that is the plan. Live streaming to a large passive audience is not in any Business edition; Google puts it in Enterprise and Education Plus. Our Google Meet page compares the rest.

Staff accounts, student accounts and the settings that matter

Keep staff and students in separate organisational units from the first day, because almost every control you will later want to apply differently is applied at that level. Sharing settings, who can be contacted, which services are switched on: all of it is easier when the two groups were never mixed.

• Sharing outside the institution. Decide deliberately whether files can be shared with people outside your domain, rather than accepting whatever the default is.
• 2-Step Verification for staff. Every Business edition includes it. Teacher and administrator accounts hold marks, fee records and parent contact details, so enforce it there first.
• Class addresses as groups. An address such as bba2027@yourcollege.edu.np works better as a group than as a mailbox somebody has to remember to check.
• Basic endpoint management. Included in all three Business editions, which matters when half the staff read school mail on personal phones.

The order the records and settings go in is on our setup page, and the wider checklist is on the security page.

When staff leave at the end of a session

Turnover in Nepali institutes is seasonal, so make offboarding a routine rather than an emergency. Transfer the leaver's Drive and Calendar data to the head of department first, then delete the account. Google keeps a deleted user's data for 20 days in case you need to restore it, and after that it is unrecoverable. Deleting the account also frees the licence for the replacement teacher.

Teaching material should not be in a personal My Drive at all. Put it in Shared Drives owned by the department, and the question of what happens when a teacher leaves stops being interesting.

Individual teachers

Everything above is about the institution's account. A teacher who wants AI help with lesson planning and marking on their own personal Google account is a different purchase entirely, and Google AI Pro cannot be bought on a Workspace account. Our guide to Google AI Pro for teachers covers that side.

If you are not sure which route your institution falls into, send us the details and we will tell you plainly whether to apply to Google or buy a business edition.