For 33 years, Kantipur has arrived at your doorstep and on your screen, carrying the stories that matter to Nepal — from the halls of Singha Durbar to the villages beyond the highway, from Kathmandu’s newsrooms to the diaspora communities that have made Nepal’s story a global one. That has never been free to produce. What has changed is how much longer we can keep pretending otherwise.

We are making two changes, and we want to explain both plainly.

First, the price of our print edition is increasing to Rs 20. The cost of newsprint, printing, and distribution has risen sharply in recent years — a reality every newspaper in Nepal and around the world is contending with. For a long time, we absorbed that cost rather than pass it to you. We can no longer do that without it affecting the quality and independence of our journalism, and that is a trade-off we are not willing to make. This is the first time in 15 years we have made this adjustment, and we do not take it lightly.

Second, we are introducing a digital subscription — for the first time in Kantipur’s history. Every print subscriber will now also get full access to Kantipur One as part of their subscription, at no extra cost. That includes an ad-free experience across our website and app; early access to deeply reported features and investigations from our enterprise team; full e-paper access, on your WhatsApp and downloadable to read offline; human-narrated recordings of select longform and investigative stories; English translations of our Nepali reporting; and a weekly newsletter with our top stories and a note from one of our editorial leaders on what stood out and what it means for you.

For readers who want digital access only — including many of you reading us from outside Nepal, in the Gulf, in the US, UK, Australia, and beyond — we have launched a separate digital-only subscription, priced for that experience. If you’re already a print subscriber, you don't need to do anything extra — your Kantipur One digital access is included, and you can redeem it directly.

Kantipur has always been supported by two things: our advertisers, and your trust. Advertising alone can no longer carry the weight of the kind of reporting we believe Nepal needs — journalism that reports from the ground with over 100 journalists rather than off a press release, holds power accountable, and covers the country in Nepali and in English, on paper, on the web, and on screen. Asking you to pay a little more, and to consider a subscription, is how we keep that reporting sustainable, rather than beholden to any one interest.

Behind every edition of our newspaper is a network of reporters and stringers across Nepal — filing from districts, digging new material to add to what officials say happened. Some of our journalists spend days, weeks, sometimes months on a single story: tracing a paper trail, sitting with a community through a disaster and its long aftermath, following a policy to its effect on a single household. That kind of reporting reaches millions of readers every single day, and its cost has little relationship to how many advertisements run alongside it.

We’re not alone in making this choice. Publications across the world that have found stable footing in recent years did it by reorienting their business around readers rather than advertisers, choosing to invest in the depth of the journalism itself and trusting that readers who valued it would support it directly. That bet paid off for them. We believe it will for us too, because we’ve seen, story after story, how much Kantipur’s readers — at home and across the diaspora — care about serious, honest reporting on Nepal.

We know this is a big shift, and Kantipur has never asked this of its readers before. We also know many of you have read us loyally for years, some for decades, some from generations of the same family. That loyalty is exactly why we’re being upfront with you now, instead of making this change quietly.

Some things won’t change. Our commitment to reporting Nepal’s stories honestly and without fear or favour doesn’t change. What you get in the paper and on our platforms doesn’t get thinner because you’re paying more — if anything, this is what allows us to invest in more reporters, more editors, more investigations, and better journalism across Kantipur Daily and The Kathmandu Post, across text, social platforms, audio and video.

Thank you for reading us, for trusting us, and now, for supporting us in this new way.