Why Getting Paid Is the Hardest Part of Building in Nepal

Everyone who builds online products in Nepal obsesses over the same two questions: how do I get traffic, and how do I make money. I have been asking the first one for years. The second one has a hidden follow-up that nobody talks about, and it is the one that actually kept me up at night: once the money exists, how do you get it into your own bank account?

I started Scriling News in 2019 with about fifty thousand rupees and a laptop. By early 2021 it was doing real traffic, and the AdSense account was finally showing a number that mattered. I remember staring at the payment screen thinking the hard part was over. Traffic was solved. Revenue was solved. Then Google said the money was on its way, and I learned that in Nepal, getting paid is its own skill, with its own learning curve, and its own paperwork.

This is a policy problem dressed up as a personal inconvenience. And if you are building anything online from Nepal, you should set up your money pipes before you need them, because when you need them, you will not have time to build them.

The first wire transfer

AdSense pays by wire transfer. That sounds simple until you do it from Kathmandu. The money leaves Google, travels through correspondent banks, and lands in your Nepali bank account a few days later, lighter by fees that nobody explained to you in advance. My first payment arrived and the bank held it pending documents. They wanted to know what the money was for, who sent it, and whether I had the right paperwork to receive foreign income.

I had built a news website. I had not built a relationship with my bank’s foreign remittance desk. Nobody had told me I needed one.

So I went to the branch with printouts: the AdSense payment receipt, my PAN registration, whatever I could find. The teller was polite and completely uninterested in my traffic graphs. What finally worked was boring and repeatable: a dollar account, a consistent story about what the business does, and paperwork kept in one folder. Once the bank understood that money would arrive every month from the same sender for the same reason, the friction disappeared. The first transfer took weeks of back and forth. The twelfth took zero thought.

That is the pattern with money in Nepal. The first time you do anything financial across borders, it is a project. The tenth time, it is routine. The cost of the first time is what stops most people.

The platform problem: no PayPal, and what that actually means

Here is the fact every Nepali founder knows and every foreign guide ignores: PayPal does not officially operate in Nepal. You cannot receive PayPal payments as a Nepali resident. Full stop.

That single missing platform reshapes how we do business online. Freelancers lose clients who only pay through PayPal. Product builders cannot use the checkout flows that work everywhere else. We all know the workarounds, and we all use them: Payoneer for receiving payments from marketplaces and clients, Wise for transfers, eSewa and Khalti for domestic payments. They work. Millions of dollars flow through them into Nepal every year.

But notice what this means. Our entire digital economy runs on workarounds. The default rails that the rest of the world uses are closed to us, so we built a parallel system of third-party accounts, higher fees, and extra steps. Every extra step is a place where money gets stuck, delayed, or taxed by fees. A freelancer in Kathmandu doing the exact same work as a freelancer in Bangalore or Berlin keeps less of it, because the plumbing costs more.

This is not a complaint about PayPal. It is a description of the playing field. You can win on this field, but you have to know you are on it.

What the Scriling years taught me about money

Scriling went from that fifty thousand rupee start to a peak of thirteen thousand dollars a month. I have written about that growth before, and the numbers are real, but here is the part I left out: the money system had to grow up alongside the traffic system, and it almost did not.

At small amounts, nobody asks questions. At real amounts, everyone does: the bank, the tax office, and eventually your own need to plan around it. AdSense revenue in dollars has to be converted, declared, and taxed in Nepal. Each of those steps has rules, and the rules were written for exporters and importers, not for a twenty-something with a news website. I spent real hours figuring out things that had nothing to do with journalism or SEO: which account type to use, what documents the bank wanted each quarter, how to keep records clean enough that an audit would be boring.

The lesson I took into Niguro is this: treat your money pipeline like infrastructure, not admin. Infrastructure gets designed before the load arrives. Admin gets handled when someone complains. If your revenue is infrastructure, you set up the dollar account, the Payoneer account, and the record-keeping system when revenue is small, so that when revenue is large, nothing changes except the numbers.

The policy layer: why this is bigger than my bank visits

Nepal’s digital economy has a strange shape. We have world-class developers, a booming freelance scene, and domestic wallets like eSewa and Khalti that work well for paying each other. What we do not have is frictionless connection between our money and the world’s money.

Every founder I know has a version of this story. The SaaS builder whose international customers cannot pay easily. The creator whose platform payouts get stuck for weeks. The agency that loses a client because invoicing across borders is a hassle. These are not individual failures of hustle. They are the predictable result of a financial system that was built for a different era, patched with workarounds, and never quite finished.

There are two ways to read this. The pessimistic one: Nepal is structurally disadvantaged, and building here means accepting permanent friction. The optimistic one, which I choose: this gap is the opportunity. Niguro exists partly because I got tired of building on rented land, and payment rails are the most rented land of all. Whoever builds genuinely Nepali-first financial infrastructure for online earners, connecting eSewa and Khalti to the global economy without the workaround tax, is building one of the most valuable companies in the country.

Policy matters here more than most founders admit. Every rule about foreign income, every banking regulation, every delay in modernizing cross-border payments is a tax on the exact people trying to build Nepal’s digital future. I am not an economist, but I have paid the tax, in fees and in hours, and I can tell you it is real.

The setup I actually use

Enough theory. Here is the practical setup, the one I wish someone had handed me in 2021 when the first wire transfer was sitting in limbo.

First, open a dollar account at a Nepali bank that handles foreign remittances routinely. Not every branch is equal; the ones near the commercial districts see this traffic daily and know the drill. Ask them, before any money arrives, what documents they need for recurring foreign income. Get the answer in writing if you can.

Second, register your business properly and get a PAN. Informal income is fine until it is not, and the moment real money arrives, informal becomes a liability. A registered business with clean records turns every bank conversation from an interrogation into a formality.

Third, get a Payoneer account and a Wise account. Between the two, you can receive from almost any client, marketplace, or platform on earth. They are not perfect, and their fees are real, but they are the standard workaround kit for Nepali online earners, and standard matters: when something goes wrong, you want a problem thousands of other Nepalis have already solved.

Fourth, keep domestic and international money in separate lanes. eSewa and Khalti for Nepal-side payments, the dollar account and Payoneer for international. Mixing them creates accounting headaches and confusing bank statements. Clean lanes mean clean records.

Fifth, track everything from the first rupee. A simple spreadsheet: date, source, amount in original currency, amount received in NPR, fees. This takes five minutes a month and saves you days when tax season or a bank query arrives.

Sixth, talk to a tax advisor once, early. Nepal’s tax treatment of foreign digital income has specifics, and getting it wrong is expensive. One consultation costs less than one mistake.

Seventh, price in dollars and plan in rupees. Your revenue arrives in dollars; your life runs in rupees. The exchange rate will move, and it will move against you at the worst moment. Build a margin into your pricing for currency swings, and keep a buffer in the dollar account instead of converting everything immediately.

None of this is exciting. That is the point. Money plumbing should be boring. If your payment setup is interesting, something is wrong.

Build the pipe before the flood

The pattern of my career, honestly, is learning infrastructure lessons the hard way and then writing them down so I stop relearning them. I learned traffic infrastructure building Scriling. I learned automation infrastructure this month, breaking a newsroom bot in two days. And I learned money infrastructure across all of it, one bank visit at a time.

If you are starting out, here is the one thing to take from this: the day your product starts earning is the worst day to discover your payment setup is broken. By then you have customers, momentum, and no spare attention. The bank does not care about your launch. The wire transfer does not wait for your sprint to end.

Set up the accounts now. Register the business now. Learn the paperwork now, while the amounts are small and the stakes are low. Then when the money comes, and I hope it comes in amounts that surprise you, it will just arrive. Quietly. Boringly. The way infrastructure is supposed to work.

Related reading: Three Companies, One Lesson is the full story of the Scriling years, including where that thirteen thousand dollar peak came from. When Governments Switch Off Your Business is about the other kind of rented land: the platforms your business depends on. And How I Stay Curious is where I first published the Scriling numbers.