Nimtto
Animated wedding invitations for Nepal, with an event website and RSVP in one link.
A paper card cannot show the way on Google Maps, count guests or switch to Nepali for the grandparents. Nimtto does all three from one link that opens on any phone, with no app to install.
The problem
Nepali weddings run across several days and several venues: mehendi, haldi, janti, the wedding itself and the reception. Families still send printed cards and then answer the same questions on WhatsApp for weeks. Relatives abroad read dates in AD, elders read them in Bikram Sambat, and nobody knows how many people are coming to which meal.
Online invitation products existed, but they were built for Western weddings. They had no Bikram Sambat dates, no Devanagari, no idea of a janti, and they priced in dollars with monthly fees.
What I built
Nimtto is an animated invitation, an event website and an RSVP system behind a single link. A family picks one of 52 designs, fills in names, ceremonies and venues, and shares it on WhatsApp, Viber or SMS. Guests open it on a slow mobile connection and see an opening scene, then every ceremony with its own time, place and map, in English or नेपाली with one tap.
I built the whole product: the theme engine and 3D scenes, the multi-page marketing site, the studio dashboard where invitations are made and tracked, the ordering and payment flow, and the server that stores RSVPs and serves share links.
What it does
For the couple
- 52 designs: 39 for Nepali weddings and 13 international ones
- Wording and symbols that follow the family's faith: Hindu, Buddhist, Kirat, Christian, Muslim or mixed
- Photos, story, gallery and the couple's song when the invitation opens
- A WhatsApp link preview that shows the couple's names and photo
For the guests
- Bikram Sambat and AD dates side by side
- One-tap switch between English and नेपाली
- Each ceremony with its own time, venue and map
- Personal guest links that greet each guest by name
For the family
- RSVP per ceremony, with totals per event and per meal
- A dashboard of replies and a CSV download
- Invitations stay online for at least a year after the event
- Date changes and name fixes allowed after publishing, within limits
For running the business
- Plans from Rs 2,999 (USD 49 abroad), paid once
- Khalti, eSewa and Fonepay QR in Nepal; PayPal or card abroad
- Studio modules for orders, clients, replies, finance, blog, music and staff
- A separate international site in USD, with its own design range
How it's built
| Front end | Vite 8 multi-page build, Three.js 0.169, GSAP 3.12 with ScrollTrigger, Lenis, Tiptap for the blog editor |
|---|---|
| 3D | Custom GLSL depth-displaced photo stages, GLTF characters, HDR lighting, instanced flowers |
| Back end | Node 22, Express 5 |
| Data | SQLite (better-sqlite3, WAL mode) with daily backups; JSON store kept as a rollback path |
| Security | argon2id passwords, CSP, HSTS, CSRF tokens, Origin checks, per-IP rate limits |
| Media | sharp and heic-convert for photos, brotli and gzip precompression at build time |
| Hosting | Docker on a VPS, deployed with Coolify behind Cloudflare (Full strict SSL) |
The front end is a Vite multi-page build. Every folder with an index.html becomes a page, so marketing pages, design pages and invitation themes all ship as static, pre-compressed files that load fast on Nepali mobile networks. Each theme follows a written contract: transform and opacity animation only, a reduced-motion version, and a fallback when WebGL is not available.
The server is a single Node and Express process with SQLite in WAL mode. That choice keeps hosting cheap and backups simple: one database file, copied daily, with 14 copies kept. The studio autosaves drafts every 0.7 seconds with optimistic versioning, and keeps drafts separate from the published snapshot that guests see.
Engineering highlights
3D scenes that still open on a cheap phone
Several designs are real 3D scenes. Durbar is a morning walk through Bhaktapur Durbar Square. Mandap is a night mandap built entirely in code, where two rigged figures act out janti, swayambar, the seven rounds and sindoor as the guest scrolls. Other scenes take real photographs and draw them as depth-displaced meshes with custom shaders, so the camera can move into the photo with true parallax.
Every 3D design has a still fallback, honours reduced-motion settings, and keeps Devanagari text free of letter-spacing so it never breaks.
Dates the way a Nepali family reads them
Each ceremony shows its Bikram Sambat date beside the AD date, counted on the venue's calendar day and time zone. A family can override the BS date to match their priest's patro, because the printed calendar the family trusts wins over any algorithm.
RSVP data a family can actually use
Guests answer per ceremony, and the family sees totals per event and per meal. The CSV export escapes spreadsheet formulas, so a guest who types a formula into a name field cannot run it in the family's Excel.
Safe edits after the cards are out
Once an invitation is published, names can be corrected up to three times and the date moved by up to 60 days. That stops a bought invitation from being reused for a different wedding, while still allowing the fixes real families need.
SEO & performance
Nimtto is built to be found. The site publishes five sitemaps (Nepal pages, international pages, designs, blog and images), and every design has its own indexable page with Product, Offer and breadcrumb structured data. Long-form landing pages such as Nepali wedding card online carry FAQ and HowTo markup.
Nepal and international audiences are separated with hreflang. The robots file allows AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, and an llms.txt file describes the product for AI assistants. Private areas like the studio and payment pages are blocked from crawling.
Screens
Where it stands
Nimtto is live at nimtto.com and taking orders in Nepal and abroad. The source code is public on GitHub, with 284 commits.
The product shows the full range of what I do in one place: real-time 3D on the web, a multi-language content system, a dashboard that families use without training, and an SEO structure that gives every design and ceremony its own page.
Planning a product like Nimtto? I design, build and launch web apps for businesses in Nepal and abroad.