Messaging — hosted in Nairobi
Coming soonMessaging
Reach every phone in Africa from one API.
Bulk SMS, WhatsApp, voice, USSD and airtime through a single API and dashboard — with direct carrier routes, delivery reports, and the regulatory paperwork handled for you.
- Direct carrier connections
- Two-way messaging & DLRs
- Three locally-hosted regions — Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Sender ID registration handled
Launching soon · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN
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 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
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
+254 119 039 063
Sales
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.
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.
Yes. Your data is hosted in Kenya and stays in-country, giving you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act. It isn't moved out of Kenya without your instruction.
In our Nairobi data centre (ke-1a). Your content is stored and served from Nairobi, close to your users.
Pay in your local currency using M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card. No foreign card or forex conversion is required.
You're billed in KES. Prices can be viewed in USD, KES, TZS, or NGN, but as a Kenya customer you pay in KES with no forex conversion.
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 · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN