Web Development
2026-10-11 · 8 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
Running a business entirely through a Facebook page is understandable, it is free, familiar, and reaches an audience that is already there. The problem shows up later: the page, its followers, its message history, and its reach all exist inside a system you do not control. A policy change, an algorithm shift that quietly reduces organic reach, or an account flagged and locked for reasons that are not always clear, can remove access to years of built-up presence overnight, with limited recourse.
This is not a hypothetical risk, Nepali business owners report locked or restricted Facebook business accounts regularly, sometimes resolved quickly, sometimes not. A website does not have this single point of failure. It is hosted on infrastructure you pay for and control, and no platform policy change can take it away.
Organic reach on Facebook pages has also declined steadily for years, meaning even a page with thousands of followers often reaches only a small fraction of them with any given post unless the business pays to boost it. A business built entirely around that reach is, in effect, renting an audience whose attention the platform can reduce at any time without notice or explanation.
“A Facebook page is rented land. A website is the only piece of property your business actually owns online.”
A basic, professional business website in Nepal, a handful of pages, services, about, contact, mobile-friendly, reasonably fast, runs roughly NPR 30,000 to 1,20,000 depending on design complexity and whether it is built on a template platform or custom-coded. A custom dynamic website with specific functionality, booking systems, member portals, custom calculators, runs roughly NPR 1,50,000 to 5,00,000 or more. A full e-commerce site with payment gateway integration, inventory management, and order tracking runs roughly NPR 1,00,000 to 5,00,000 or more depending on scale.
Beyond the build, ongoing costs are modest but real: a domain name roughly NPR 1,500 to 2,500 a year, hosting for a small site roughly NPR 2,500 to 6,000 a year, and basic maintenance, security updates, small content changes, roughly NPR 5,000 to 20,000 a year. Against the cost of even a single lost B2B deal or a month of confused customers unable to find pricing information, this is a genuinely small ongoing investment.
Honesty matters here too: a very small, hyperlocal, cash-only business, a single street vendor, a tiny neighborhood shop relying entirely on walk-in and word of mouth, may genuinely get limited return from a website in the short term, and a well-maintained Google Business Profile plus Facebook presence can cover the need adequately at that scale. The calculation changes the moment a business wants to grow beyond its immediate neighborhood, sell online, attract B2B or international clients, or simply stop being invisible to anyone searching Google rather than scrolling Facebook.
A reasonable test is to ask how many potential customers are currently searching Google for what you sell rather than discovering you by walking past or hearing about you. If that number is genuinely near zero, a website is a lower priority than other investments. If it is not, the business is likely already losing some of that demand to a competitor who does show up, quietly and without the business ever knowing the opportunity existed in the first place.
The sensible starting point for most small businesses is the basic tier, a clean, fast, mobile-friendly site with clear services, pricing ranges, and contact information, not a feature-heavy custom build before there is proven demand to justify it. Scope creep, adding features speculatively before knowing whether they will be used, is the most common way a simple website project balloons in cost and timeline.
Arcetis builds at every tier of this range and generally recommends starting lean and expanding as the business's actual needs become clear, rather than guessing upfront. A site that launches in a few weeks and starts capturing search traffic immediately beats a more ambitious one still in development six months later, since the gap in the meantime is pure lost opportunity.
For a very basic presence, yes, tools exist that let a business owner build a simple site without coding. The trade-off is usually weaker performance, less control over SEO structure, and a less distinctive design, acceptable for a minimal starting point but often worth upgrading once the business can afford a properly built site.
Yes, for the reasons above, platform risk, search invisibility, and credibility, but the website's job in that case can be simpler: a clear services or product overview with pricing and a direct link to message you, rather than a full e-commerce build, since the actual transaction already happens through DMs.
A basic site typically takes two to four weeks from content being finalized to launch, though this varies with how quickly the business provides photos, text, and feedback. Delays most often come from the business side, not the developer's.