Messaging — coming soon in Kenya
Coming soonBulk SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD for Kenya
One API for every channel a Kenyan phone answers.
The Communications Authority counted 84,090,298 active SIMs in Kenya at the end of March 2026, across 78.7 million connected devices — of which 50.2 million are smartphones. Read that the other way round and it is the whole argument for this product: more than a quarter of the handsets your customers hold will never open an app, and every one of them answers SMS, answers a call and runs USSD. Lineserve Messaging is being built to reach both halves of that market from one place, on the account your Nairobi servers already live on. It is not open yet — join the waitlist and we will tell you when it lands and what the first release covers.
- Coming soon — join the waitlist
- SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD from one API
- Built for every Kenyan handset, not only the smartphones
- Quoted in shillings when it launches, on your existing account
- Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
Launching soon · Billed in KES
Channels
Every way your customers' phones can listen
One API and one dashboard across all channels — start with Bulk SMS, add the rest as they launch.
Bulk SMS
Transactional and promotional SMS with delivery reports, two-way replies, and reach into 195 countries over direct carrier routes.
WhatsApp Business API
Rich media, message templates, and two-way conversations on the channel your customers already use.
Voice
Programmatic calls and IVR menus from your applications — announcements, verifications, and call flows.
USSD
Interactive menus that work on every handset with no data or smartphone required — built for reach.
Airtime
Send airtime top-ups and rewards to any number via API — incentives, refunds, and disbursements.
OTP & 2FA
One-time codes over SMS, WhatsApp, or voice with smart fallback — verification that actually arrives.
Channel availability and rates will be announced at launch — talk to sales for early access.
The networks
Who you are actually trying to reach in Kenya
Kenya is the easiest of the three markets to describe and the hardest to be lazy about. The Communications Authority puts Safaricom at 68.9% of mobile subscriptions and 89.1% of mobile money; Airtel Networks Kenya holds roughly 23.2 million subscribers, Telkom Kenya 584,438, with Equitel and Jamii Telecommunications taking the remainder. One network carries most of the country — and the second still carries more than twenty million people, so a campaign that works beautifully on one and quietly fails on another has failed for a city's worth of your customers.
The bigger split is not between networks. It is between handsets. Smartphones are 63.7% of the 78.7 million devices the CA counts as connected — leaving something close to 28 million devices that will never install anything. Choosing a channel in Kenya is therefore a demographic decision before it is a technical one. WhatsApp reaches the smartphone half — 62.6 million mobile data subscriptions, averaging 15.1 GB a quarter — with images, buttons and a thread that survives the week. SMS, voice and USSD reach everyone, including the customer whose bundle ran out on Thursday. Most senders here need an order of preference rather than a favourite: the rich channel first, the one that always arrives behind it, and a voice call for the message that has to be understood rather than read.
Which is why USSD here is a current channel rather than a legacy one. Dial a code and a menu appears on any handset ever sold in this country: no install, no bundle, no login. That is how an enormous share of Kenya transacts. Mobile money runs to 53.4 million active subscriptions and 602,470 agents, and the SACCO member checking a balance, the borrower restructuring a loan and the farmer confirming a payout are all inside a session that started with a dialled code.
Over all of it sits the Communications Authority of Kenya, which licenses the sector and publishes the statistics this page quotes. What may be sent, under whose name and on what basis is regulated country by country, and the rules in Nairobi are not the rules in Dar es Salaam or Lagos. That is a conversation worth having early, and it is one of the things the waitlist is for.
84.09M
Active mobile subscriptions in Kenya (CA, Q1 2026)
63.7%
Share of connected devices that are smartphones (CA, Q1 2026)
53.4M
Active mobile money subscriptions — 100.1% penetration (CA)
602,470
Registered mobile money agents in Kenya (CA, Q1 2026)
SMS has no install step
Every handset sold in Kenya arrives with an inbox. No download, no onboarding, no permission prompt, no operating system version that broke it. For an OTP or a one-line balance, that reliability is the entire product.
Voice, for when reading is not the point
A recorded call in Swahili or English reaches the customer who does not read English comfortably, the elderly guarantor, the driver who cannot look at a screen. It also carries weight text does not — a collections call and a verification callback both land differently when a phone actually rings.
Delivery is a measurement, not a hope
The question to ask any messaging supplier is not what share of messages arrive, but what they can tell you about the ones that did not — per network, per message, in a form your own system can act on. Ask it of everyone you shortlist, us included.
Payments
In Kenya, the message and the money are the same surface
Mobile money penetration here is above 100% of the population: 53.4 million active subscriptions, 602,470 agents, Safaricom on 89.1% of the market. Almost every one of those transactions ends the same way — a message arriving to say what just happened to somebody's money. Which is why a Kenyan business rarely buys messaging as a marketing tool. It buys it as part of its payment stack.
Priced in shillings, at launch
Rates are published when the product opens, in KES, from a Kenyan price list rather than a dollar figure converted at the moment you click. Nothing is quoted here yet because nothing is for sale here yet — join the waitlist and the pricing reaches you when it reaches the page.
M-Pesa
The rail this market reaches for first. Lineserve accepts M-Pesa from Kenyan customers today for every live product, in shillings, with no foreign card and no conversion involved, and messaging will settle the same way when it opens.
Bank transfer, or card
Messaging spend grows with your traffic rather than sitting still like a server bill, so it reaches finance as a figure somebody has to approve — which is a transfer with a reference. Visa and Mastercard are there in shillings for the teams that would rather keep a card on file.
Messaging carries no published rate card before launch — ask [email protected] to be told first. Displayed prices across the site exclude VAT; Kenya's 16% is shown separately at checkout.
The platform
Built for delivery, not just sending
Carrier routes, receipts, retries, and regulatory filings — the unglamorous parts of messaging, handled.
Direct carrier connections
450+ direct routes into 195 countries — messages take the short path, not the grey route.
Two-way messaging
Inbound replies stream to your webhook in real time for surveys, support, and confirmations.
Real-time delivery reports
Per-message delivery receipts with failure reasons, and automatic retries up to three times.
Message scheduling
Queue campaigns up to six months ahead, in any timezone, from the dashboard or API.
Sender ID management
We file registrations with the regulator in each market and keep them current.
Compliance built in
GDPR-aligned, built for Kenya's DPA and Nigeria's NDPR, with automatic DND filtering for promos.
REST API & 7 SDKs
PHP, Python, Node.js, Java, C#, Go, and Ruby — most teams send their first message within the hour.
Campaign tools
Contact groups, templates, and per-recipient personalization without writing code.
99.95% uptime
Redundant delivery infrastructure across data centres, with automatic failover.
Regions
Nairobi is home. The other two are there when you need them.
ke-1a is in Nairobi, and for a Kenyan business that is most of the argument. Your customers arrive on Safaricom, on Faiba, on Zuku, on Poa — 2.65 million fixed subscriptions and 84.1 million active SIMs, nearly all of them inside the country. Lineserve peers at KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK runs across four Nairobi facilities, so traffic between your instance and another of its 136 networks is handed over a few kilometres away. A round trip that starts and finishes inside the metro is typically around 2 ms.
That matters because of where Kenya's bandwidth comes ashore. Every international subsea cable lands at Mombasa — SEACOM, EASSy, TEAMS, PEACE, DARE1 and LION2 — and the capacity is hauled roughly 480 km inland before it reaches a Nairobi rack. Anything leaving the country still makes that trip. Domestic traffic takes the other route entirely, exchanged in Nairobi between networks in the same city, and choosing ke-1a decides which of those two journeys your checkout depends on.
Dar es Salaam and Lagos sit on the same account, the same API and the same shilling invoice. Open tz-1a when you start selling into Tanzania and want the data held there under Tanzanian law, or ng-1a when Lagos becomes a market rather than a pin on a map. They are also where a copy goes when you want one outside Kenya — a standby database, a backup bucket — which makes disaster recovery a configuration change instead of a second supplier.
Kenya
Nairobi
~2 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Kenya
Tanzania
Dar es Salaam
~6 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Tanzania
Nigeria
Lagos
~4 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Nigeria
Uganda
Kampala
~3 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Uganda
Use cases
Built for what you're building
OTP & 2FA
One-time codes for banking, fintech, and SaaS logins — delivered in seconds, with fallback.
Marketing campaigns
Opt-in promotions with personalization, scheduling, and automatic DND filtering.
Alerts & notifications
Transaction confirmations, security alerts, and outage notices the moment they happen.
Reminders
Appointments, payments, and renewals — fewer no-shows and late payments, on autopilot.
How it works
First message in under an hour
Create an account
Sign up and get sandbox API keys with free test credits — no card required.
Register your sender ID
Send us your business details and we file with the regulator in each market for you.
Send from anywhere
One REST call or the dashboard — delivery reports stream back to your webhook.
Uptime SLA
99.9%
- DDoS filtering is included, not an upsell
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Measured monthly, per region, on network and power availability
Support
A Nairobi number, and East Africa Time all year
Kenya has its own line: +254 119 039 063. Alongside it are [email protected] and the ticket system, and Lineserve Limited keeps an office on Utalii Lane, View Park Towers, in the Nairobi CBD. A supplier with a street address in your own city is a different kind of counterparty from a web form and a billing address in another hemisphere.
Kenya runs on East Africa Time, UTC+3, and has never observed daylight saving. That reads like trivia until you are the one holding the phone. Business hours here mean the same thing in January and in July; nothing slides by an hour twice a year because another country changed its clocks. When your checkout starts throwing 502s at 09:20 on a Tuesday, it is 09:20 for whoever picks up — an ordinary working morning in the same city, rather than the small hours of somebody's Monday night, eight time zones west.
The other half of local support is vocabulary, not hours. The person you reach knows what a Safaricom callback is, what KIXP has to do with the trace you are staring at, and why your finance team wants a KRA PIN on the invoice. None of that has to be explained before the actual problem can be. Buy from somewhere that has never sold into Kenya and the first twenty minutes of every serious ticket go on describing the country.
Kenya
+254 119 039 063Sales
[email protected]Why Lineserve
Local routes beat global relays
Global aggregators relay African traffic through whoever is cheapest this week. Direct carrier connections and local registrations are what actually move delivery rates.
Tax & invoicing
16% VAT, and a line item finance can actually forecast
Kenya's standard VAT rate is 16%, and the Kenya Revenue Authority's list of taxable digital supplies names cloud services, email hosting and software subscriptions. Messaging will be quoted the way everything else here is: exclusive of VAT, with the 16% shown separately, so the figure in your budget line and the figure on the quote match.
The harder question with messaging is not the rate, it is the shape of the spend. A server is a fixed monthly number. A message volume moves with your loan book, your order count or your exam calendar, and a finance team that has only ever approved fixed infrastructure lines will want to know how a month breaks down, what drives a spike, and who authorised the traffic. Bring those questions to the waitlist conversation and they are answered before the first statement rather than after it.
The mechanics of a claimable Kenyan invoice are the same as for any supplier, and they are worth settling at the order: the supplier's registered name and identifiers, your own KRA PIN, a unique invoice number, the service and the period, the taxable value, and the VAT stated separately. Send [email protected] your PIN and your registered name as the KRA holds it, plus any purchase-order reference, and the billing account carries them from the first run.
Budget for it before it exists
Teams planning messaging into next year's budget need a volume estimate more than a rate: OTPs per active user a month, reminders per borrower per cycle, notifications per order. Work that out now, and the rate card drops into a model that is already built.
Prices exclude VAT. Talk to [email protected] or +254 119 039 063 about invoicing requirements early — it is a five-minute conversation at the start of a relationship and an awkward one in April.
Data residency
A message log is the most personal database you own
Think about what a messaging platform accumulates. Every number you sent to, which identifies a living person. The text you sent them, which can carry a balance, a debt, a diagnosis or a child's name. The timestamp, which places that person in a moment. Held together, that is a more revealing dataset than most of the databases it was generated from.
Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019 governs it, and the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner regulates it. Section 4 reaches anyone not established in Kenya who processes personal data about people located here — so messaging Kenyan customers from a platform on another continent keeps you inside the Act rather than outside it. Sections 48 and 49 attach conditions to moving personal data out of the country, with sensitive personal data needing consent and confirmation of appropriate safeguards.
Regulation 26 of the Data Protection (General) Regulations, 2021 goes further for a named list of purposes: civil registration and identity management, elections, public finance systems, designated protected computer systems, basic education, and primary or secondary healthcare. Processing for those requires at least one serving copy of the personal data in a data centre located in Kenya. Set that list beside a list of who sends the most SMS in this country — schools, clinics, county programmes — and the overlap is not a coincidence. Messaging is being built to run in ke-1a, in Nairobi, where the rest of your Kenyan data already is.
Where the log sits is a design decision
Recipient lists, message bodies and delivery records are exactly the sort of data an audit asks about first, because they are the easiest to correlate with a named person. Holding them in Nairobi, under Kenyan law, where your regulator can see them, means the cross-border question does not arise for them at all.
What Kenya sends
The message types this market runs on
OTPs and login codes
The message where a delay is indistinguishable from a failure — the customer taps resend, gives up, then calls support. Kenyan fintechs, banks and anything with a Kenyan login population send these constantly, on whichever channel reaches the handset the customer actually holds.
Transaction alerts and payment confirmations
Money moved, so somebody gets told. Kenya's 53.4 million mobile money subscriptions have trained a whole market to expect confirmation within seconds, and a business whose alerts arrive slower than the wallet's looks broken next to it. Digital lenders, SACCOs and merchant platforms live on this stream.
Repayment reminders and collections
The Central Bank has processed over 800 digital credit provider applications since licensing began in 2022, and the sector runs on sequenced contact: a reminder before the date, a nudge on it, an escalation after, and a self-service route for the borrower who wants to restructure rather than dodge. That last one is usually a USSD menu — the borrower short of money is also short of data.
Delivery and dispatch notifications
Kenyan e-commerce runs from Jumia and Kilimall down to a long tail of Instagram sellers with a boda rider outside. Order confirmed, rider assigned, rider is downstairs, delivery failed and here is how to reschedule — four messages that decide whether a customer orders again, and one of them has to reach somebody standing in the street.
Appointment reminders and school notices
Clinics and diagnostics labs send reminders because a missed appointment costs a slot that cannot be resold. Schools send fee balances, term dates and results to a parent upcountry holding a feature phone. Both sit on the Regulation 26 list, which puts the location of the reminder database in the same conversation as the reminder.
Surveys and field data collection
NGOs, donor programmes and agricultural extension services collect answers from people with no data bundle and no smartphone. A USSD session or a structured SMS exchange gets a response rate a web form never will, because the respondent needs nothing they do not already have.
USSD menus as the whole product
For SACCOs, insurers and microfinance the dialled menu is not a fallback — it is the customer interface. Balance, mini-statement, transfer, claim status, loan application, in a session that works on every phone in the country.
When it lands
What moving would look like
From an aggregator you already use
Nobody swaps a live OTP path on a Tuesday, and nobody should. The realistic shape is parallel: keep the existing supplier for traffic that must not blink, move one low-stakes stream first, and compare what comes back. The work in between is known. Normalise your numbers to one format, since Kenyan lists carry 07, 01, 254 and +254 versions of the same person. Inventory your templates and which system emits each. And carry your opt-out list across intact — that is the one file you cannot rebuild.
From integrations you built yourself
Plenty of Kenyan teams wired up their own connections years ago and have maintained them since. The code is usually fine. The tax is everything around it: separate credentials, separate formats, separate quirks in how each side reports a failure, separate people to call when something stops. Consolidating that is not about writing less code once — it is about whoever inherits it in 2028.
Messaging is not open yet, so nothing above is a switch you can make today. Join the waitlist at [email protected], or ring +254 119 039 063, and we will tell you when it is ready and what the first release covers.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Transactional messages — OTPs, confirmations, notifications — are exempt from Do-Not-Disturb registries and deliver around the clock. Promotional campaigns require opt-in and are automatically filtered against DND lists where they apply.
We file the paperwork with the regulator for you. In Kenya, Communications Authority approval typically takes 2–3 business days once your business documents are in; Nigeria and Tanzania follow their own regulators with similar handling.
160 characters for standard GSM text, 70 for Unicode (emoji, Arabic, and other scripts). Longer messages concatenate automatically, up to 6 parts.
Yes. Two-way messaging delivers inbound replies to your webhook in real time — for surveys, support conversations, and confirmations.
Real-time delivery receipts stream to your webhook with per-message status. Failed messages retry automatically up to three times, and you're not charged for messages that never deliver.
Yes — schedule messages up to six months ahead, in any timezone, from the dashboard or the API.
A REST API with SDKs in seven languages — PHP, Python, Node.js, Java, C#, Go, and Ruby. Most teams send their first message in under an hour, starting in a sandbox with free test credits and no card required.
Yes. GDPR-aligned with in-country data residency, built for Kenya's Data Protection Act and Nigeria's NDPR, with DND registry filtering applied to promotional traffic automatically.
No. Messaging is in development — no checkout, no rate card, nothing to log into yet. Join the waitlist at [email protected] and you hear from us when it opens.
There is no published date yet. The waitlist hears first, with a plain account of what the first release covers and what follows it.
Email [email protected] or ring +254 119 039 063 with the channels you care about, the kind of messages you send and a rough monthly volume. That last figure is the useful one — it shapes the first release.
Bulk SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD, from one API and one dashboard. Which of them ships in the first release, and in what order, is exactly what the waitlist will be told first.
Rates are announced at launch, in Kenyan shillings. There is no messaging price on this site today.
Reaching every network a Kenyan customer might be on is the problem this is being built around — Safaricom carries 68.9% of subscriptions, but the twenty-odd million people on Airtel are somebody's customers too. How that coverage is delivered will be published when the product opens.
Sender identity is regulated country by country and the rules differ. Bring your requirements to the waitlist conversation — the brand you want to send as, the markets you send into — and the team will go through what applies at launch.
Because it is how a large share of Kenya transacts. No smartphone, no data bundle, no install — which is what reaches the roughly 28 million connected devices in this country that are not smartphones.
For part of your list it is better — images, buttons, a thread the customer can scroll back through. For the rest of your list it does not exist. Smartphones are 63.7% of connected devices here, so the sensible design uses both and decides per recipient.
That is what ke-1a is for. Nairobi is where Kenyan customers' data is held today for every live Lineserve product, and messaging is being built to run there too. Recipient lists, message bodies and delivery logs are personal data under Kenya's Data Protection Act, which is what makes their location worth asking about.
A mobile number identifies one person and reaches them directly; a message log adds what you said and when. Kenya's Data Protection Act covers it, and section 4 reaches processing about people located in Kenya wherever the processor sits.
The Communications Authority of Kenya licenses the sector and publishes the statistics this page cites. Data protection sits separately, with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.
It is being built to live on the same account — one login, one billing profile, and the same Nairobi region as your Cloud Servers and storage.
Customer references are available under NDA. Ask [email protected] and the team will arrange one against the sector and workload you are buying for.
Every channel, one API — launching soon
Bulk SMS leads the way, with WhatsApp, voice, USSD and airtime to follow. Talk to us to reserve early access.
Launching soon · Sandbox with free test credits · Billed in KES