Built in Kenya, sold to the world, paid for by M-Pesa
Most business software still assumes a credit card and a yearly contract. A great many of its customers have neither.
By Howell Asava, Developer, Vukalink ยท
Software pricing pages tend to look alike. A row of plans, a toggle that makes the yearly price look kind, and at the bottom a form that wants sixteen digits from a card.
That last step is where a large part of the world drops out. In Kenya, money moves by phone. A shopkeeper, a clinic and a school all pay suppliers through M-Pesa every day. Asking them for a dollar card to buy a support tool is asking them to change how they do business in order to become your customer.
What we do instead
Vukalink is built in Kenya, and it takes payment the way Kenya pays. Prices are shown in shillings as well as dollars, at a published list rate of KES 130 to the dollar. Premium works out at KES 1,560 per technician a month when billed yearly.
Payment goes to an M-Pesa Buy Goods till, number 6993823. You pay, keep the confirmation code from the SMS, and send it to us with your email address. We send back a key.
We should be plain about where this stands. You can order online and pay by M-Pesa today, and the key is issued as soon as we have confirmed the payment. Automatic confirmation within a minute, through Safaricom's Daraja API, is written and tested, and is waiting on the final step with the mobile network before it is switched on. Card payments will follow. We would rather tell you that than show a checkout button that leads nowhere.
Monthly, if you want it
The other habit we declined to copy is the yearly-only contract. When we read the public price lists of the best-known remote support products in November 2026, the dominant ones billed by the year. For an established company that is a line in a budget. For a technician with eleven clients it is a risk.
So Vukalink can be paid month by month. It costs a little more that way, and nobody is locked in.
Not only for Kenya
None of this makes Vukalink a local product. A session runs the same between Mombasa and Manchester as between two desks in one office, and the dollar prices are set to compete anywhere. But it is designed from a place where the usual assumptions do not hold, and we think software built that way travels well.