Google Workspace for Small Business in Nepal

Count accounts, not staff

The first mistake is buying a licence for every address you want. You pay per person who needs their own mailbox, calendar and Drive. Addresses like info@yourcompany.com or sales@yourcompany.com do not need a licence of their own.

There are two ways to run a shared address. A group is an address that delivers to several people, so mail to sales@ lands with all three of your sales staff and any of them can answer it. An alias is a second address on somebody's existing mailbox, so info@ simply arrives in the owner's inbox alongside their own name@ address. Neither one is a paid user.

You want	Use	Costs a licence?
Ramesh needs his own inbox, calendar and files	A user account	Yes, one paid user
Three people should all see mail to sales@	A group	No licence needed
Enquiries to info@ should reach the manager	An alias on the manager's account	No licence needed
A shop counter PC everyone signs into	Nothing. Stop doing this	n/a

Every Business edition tops out at 300 users, which no small business in Nepal is going to hit. What you should watch instead is people sharing one login, because that is the thing that makes the account unusable the day the sharing stops.

What a year actually costs

WebsNP bills Business Starter and Business Standard yearly, per user, in Nepali rupees. Business Starter is $2.78 per user per month, which comes to $25.83 per user for the year. Business Standard is $3.97 per user per month, or $47.68 a year. Here is what that looks like for the team sizes we are usually asked about.

Paid users	Business Starter, one year	Business Standard, one year
3 users	$77.48	$143.05
6 users	$154.97	$286.09
10 users	$258.28	$476.82

Groups and aliases are not in those totals because they are free. A six-person business with four shared addresses still pays for six.

Google's own list price is in US dollars: $7 per user per month on the annual plan for Business Starter, $14 for Business Standard and $22 for Business Plus, or $8.40, $16.80 and $26.40 on the flexible monthly plan. Nepali rupees are not one of Google's billing currencies. Nepal falls under Google's "other" category, which means paying in US dollars or euros by credit or debit card, and Google itself tells customers to contact a local reseller where a local payment method is not offered. The full breakdown of both routes is on our price page for Nepal.

Which edition to start on

Most small businesses in Nepal should start on Business Starter and stop reading here. The cases for moving up are specific.

Business Starter

Email on your domain, 30 GB of pooled storage multiplied by the number of users, Meet for up to 100 people, Shared Drives, one appointment booking page, and Gemini in Gmail for drafting and summarising threads. No meeting recording. Details on the Business Starter page.

Business Standard

Worth it if you record meetings, keep years of scanned paperwork, or want Gemini inside Docs and Sheets rather than only in Gmail. Storage jumps to 2 TB per user in the pool and Meet takes 150 people with recording, breakout rooms and noise cancellation. See Business Standard.

Business Plus

Buy this only for a reason you can name: Google Vault for retention and eDiscovery, advanced device management, 500 people in a Meet call, or attendance tracking. Most small businesses do not have that reason yet.

Storage is worth understanding before you choose, because it is pooled. Six Starter users do not get 30 GB each with a hard wall; they share 180 GB across the whole organisation, and one person with a large Drive can use more than their share. If the pool goes 25% over or stays over for 14 days, nobody can add new files to Drive or create new Docs, Sheets and Slides until it comes back down. If you are unsure how your storage is trending, our note on right-sizing a Workspace plan goes through it.

The order to set things up in

Own the domain first. Register or take control of yourcompany.com or your .com.np name before anything else. If your domain sits with a freelancer who built the site in 2019, sort that out now rather than on cutover day.
Create the owner account on the domain. The Workspace super administrator should be an address on your own domain, not somebody's personal Gmail. Add a recovery phone and a recovery email to it the same day.
Verify the domain. This is a TXT record at the domain. The record is usually active in about ten minutes and Google's confirmation is normally quick, though it can take up to an hour.
Create the real people, then the shared addresses. Users first, then groups and aliases for info@, sales@ and accounts@. Agree a naming convention before you make the second account.
Point mail at Google. One MX record, host @, priority 1, value smtp.google.com. DNS changes can take up to 72 hours to propagate everywhere, so do this at a quiet time, not the morning of a tender deadline.
Add SPF, then DKIM, then DMARC. SPF is a TXT record with v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all. DKIM uses a 2048-bit key with the selector "google" and should be generated once Gmail has been running 24 to 72 hours. DMARC starts at p=none while you watch the reports.
Turn on 2-Step Verification and set the sharing defaults. Do it while the account is small. Enforcing it on 20 people later is a much longer afternoon.
Move the old mail. Historic mail comes across with Google's data import tool, which reads IMAP accounts such as cPanel webmail and Zoho.

Every step above is covered record by record in our Workspace setup guide, and WebsNP does the whole sequence for its own Workspace customers as part of the order.

Three shapes of small business

These are illustrations, not customers. They show how the same product ends up looking different depending on what the business does.

A trekking agency in Thamel with six staff

Two office staff, two guides who mostly live on their phones, an accountant and the owner. Six paid users. Shared addresses for info@ and bookings@ as groups, so an enquiry from a client in Germany at two in the morning is not sitting unread in one person's inbox. Starter is enough until they start recording client video calls or storing years of trip photos, at which point storage decides it for them.

A cafe chain in Lalitpur with three outlets

Only four people need a mailbox: the owner, the operations manager, the accountant and the marketing person. Outlet managers use a shared orders@ group rather than a licence each. Most of the value here is Drive and Sheets, with supplier invoices and daily sales in one place instead of on three laptops.

A hardware supplier in Butwal with nine staff

Nine mailboxes, heavy on quotations and purchase orders. Sending volume matters to them: a paid Gmail account can send 2,000 messages a day, to a maximum of 2,000 recipients per message with no more than 500 of those external, and attachments going out are capped at 25 MB. That is generous for quotations and too small for a folder of product photos, which is what Drive links are for.

Mistakes we see in the first month

The super administrator is a personal Gmail. When that person leaves, the company's email account leaves with them. The owner account belongs on the company domain.
No recovery options. An administrator account with no recovery phone or recovery email is one forgotten password away from a very bad week.
2-Step Verification left off. Business email is the address your bank, your suppliers and your customers trust. Protect it accordingly.
One login shared by four people. Cheap until somebody leaves, at which point you cannot tell what they sent, cannot remove only their access and have to reset everything.
Files kept in My Drive instead of Shared Drives. Files in a personal My Drive belong to that person. Files in a Shared Drive belong to the company. Our note on Shared Drives versus My Drive explains the difference.
Old MX records left in place. Half the mail keeps going to the old host and the other half to Google, which is a fault that takes a week to notice.

What changes as you grow

Adding a person mid-year is normal and you should plan for it rather than buying spare licences up front. Contact us to add users during a term and we will invoice the additions.

When somebody leaves, transfer their Drive and Calendar data before you delete the account. Google keeps a deleted user's data for 20 days for restore, and after that it is gone. Deleting the account also frees the licence for the next hire.

The upgrade from Starter to Standard usually comes for one of three reasons: the storage pool filled up, somebody needed a recording of a meeting, or the team wanted Gemini in Docs and Sheets rather than only in Gmail. If none of those has happened, you are on the right plan.

If the budget will not stretch to a licence per person at all, WebsNP's own hosted business email is cheaper per mailbox and still gives you addresses on your domain, without Drive, Meet and the rest.

Frequently asked questions

How many Google Workspace accounts does a small business need?

One per person who needs their own mailbox. Shared addresses such as info@, sales@ or accounts@ can be set up as groups or aliases and do not consume a licence. A six-person office with four shared addresses pays for six accounts.

Is Business Starter enough for a small business in Nepal?

For most it is. You get email on your domain, Meet for up to 100 people, Shared Drives, an appointment booking page and Gemini in Gmail. You do not get meeting recording, Gemini in Docs and Sheets, eSignature or Google Vault. Those are the reasons to move to Business Standard or Business Plus.

Can I pay for Google Workspace in Nepali rupees?

Not to Google directly. Nepali rupees are not one of Google's billing currencies, so buying from Google means paying in US dollars or euros by card. Buying through WebsNP means an invoice in rupees, payable by Fonepay QR, bank transfer or eSewa, while the accounts stay in your own Google Admin console.

What happens to the storage if one person fills up Drive?

Storage is pooled across the organisation rather than fixed per person, so one heavy user can take more than their share. If the pool goes 25% over its limit, or stays over for 14 days, users cannot add new files to Drive or create new Docs, Sheets or Slides until space is freed or the plan changes.

Is there a free trial?

Google runs a 14-day free trial for up to 10 users when you sign up directly. For an order through WebsNP, ask us first and we will tell you what applies to your case.

What do I do when a member of staff leaves?

Transfer their Drive and Calendar data to somebody else first, then delete the account. Google keeps the data of a deleted user for 20 days in case you need to restore it, and after that it cannot be recovered. Deleting the account frees the licence to reassign.

Sources and further reading

Product facts on this page were checked against Google's own documentation on the date shown above. Google changes plan contents, limits and country availability over time, so treat the official pages as the final word.