Messaging — hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
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 sovereignty — 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, Dar es Salaam or Lagos — and what decides it
The rule is unglamorous and it holds nearly everywhere: put the workload in the country whose users and whose records it serves. Per-unit prices are identical in all three regions, so the decision is geography and law rather than cost — and there is no useful midpoint, because traffic between the three cities is still commonly carried through Europe.
ke-1a is for Kenyan users and Kenyan records, and for regional teams whose head office is already in Nairobi. Every Kenyan subsea cable — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — comes ashore at Mombasa, and that capacity is carried roughly 480 km inland to the city where the carriers and the customers are. Domestic traffic never makes that trip: it is exchanged inside Nairobi at KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK has run since 2002, with 136 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of connected capacity. Lineserve peers there.
tz-1a is for Tanzanian users, and it is where moving an origin changes the most: Tanzania has no content-delivery edge of its own, so a Dar es Salaam viewer is served from another country however the CDN is configured. There is no inland haul either — SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS come ashore in the city itself, and Dar es Salaam is a named landing point on 2Africa. Tanzanian networks meet at TIX, run since 2003 by the country's service-provider association, and 13,820 km of state fibre carries one origin on to Mwanza, Arusha and Dodoma.
ng-1a is for scale and for regulated Nigerian workloads. Eight subsea systems land in and around Lagos, among them MainOne, SAT-3, WACS, Equiano and 2Africa, which comes ashore at Lekki. Nigerian networks exchange domestic traffic at IXPN, founded in 2006 to stop domestic packets being hauled to London and now running 13 points of presence across seven states. Lagos also has a date attached: a Central Bank circular directs payment transaction data generated in Nigeria to be stored there from 1 January 2027.
All three give a buyer based elsewhere the same pair of things: a request from a user in the city reaches a machine in that city, typically in single-digit milliseconds, and the records it touches sit under one named country's law.
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%
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Measured monthly, per region, on network and power availability
- Tier III colocation facilities across all live regions
Support
You are on a different continent from your infrastructure
That is the real reservation, and it is answerable with what exists. Architecture, quotes, contracts, a data processing agreement, the registered names and tax identifiers that have to appear on your invoices: [email protected], in writing, in a thread you can forward to your own legal and finance people. Running services are driven from the console, the API and the ticket system on your account. Two phone lines are published for the region — +254 119 039 063 in Kenya and +255 761 847 121 in Tanzania.
Scheduling across the distance is the practical problem, and the arithmetic is friendlier than it looks. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam run on East Africa Time, UTC+3; Lagos on West Africa Time, UTC+1. Neither observes daylight saving, so the gap between your clock and theirs moves only when your own clocks change, and a window agreed in June still means what you thought it meant in December. From London, Nairobi is three hours ahead in winter and two in summer, and Lagos an hour ahead in winter and level in summer. From New York in July, a 09:00 call is 14:00 in Lagos.
Most of what would be a phone call elsewhere is a call you make yourself. Building, resizing, rebooting, snapshotting and rebuilding an instance are API and console operations that behave identically at three in the morning your time or theirs, and a browser console reaches a machine that has lost its own networking. What needs a person in the building is a physical fault — and that person is there already.
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.
Your data stays in the region you deploy to. Across our data centres in Nairobi (Kenya), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Lagos (Nigeria) it never has to leave the continent — deploy in the country closest to your users and your data is held there.
In whichever of our three regions you choose — Nairobi (ke-1a), Dar es Salaam (tz-1a), or Lagos (ng-1a). Your content is stored and served from that in-country facility.
Pay in USD by card or bank transfer — or switch to our Kenya, Tanzania, or Nigeria market to pay locally in KES, TZS, or NGN with methods like M-Pesa.
You can view and pay in USD, or switch to a local market to pay in KES (Kenya), TZS (Tanzania), or NGN (Nigeria). You're settled in the currency you choose at checkout.
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