Messaging — coming soon
Coming soonReach Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria from one API
Three countries, three regulators, one integration.
84.09 million active SIMs in Kenya. 111.9 million subscriptions in Tanzania. 189.68 million in Nigeria. If your product has users in those three countries, you already know the shape of the problem: three telecoms markets that behave nothing like each other, several suppliers to contract with, and three sets of rules that change independently of one another. Lineserve Messaging is being built to be the single integration underneath all of it — SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD, on the same account as regions in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos. 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
- Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria — three markets, one integration
- Quoted in USD when it launches, or locally in KES, TZS and NGN
- Regions in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos — your data stays in-country
Launching soon · Local billing in KES, TZS, NGN & UGX
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 markets
Three countries that need three different messages
Kenya is a concentrated market. The Communications Authority puts one operator at 68.9% of mobile subscriptions and 89.1% of mobile money, with Airtel holding most of the rest. It is also the market where USSD is a first-class channel rather than a legacy one: mobile money penetration is above 100% of the population, across 53.4 million active subscriptions and 602,470 agents, and an enormous share of the country transacts through a dialled menu that needs no smartphone and no data.
Tanzania is the opposite. Vodacom holds 32.3%, Yas 28.5%, Airtel 21.2% and Halotel 16.4% of 111.9 million subscriptions, so no single network is even a third of your list. Mobile money is split the same way across four wallets. And smartphone penetration is 42.5%, which means the majority of Tanzanian handsets will never open an app. A campaign designed for Nairobi tends to arrive in Dar es Salaam over-invested in one network and one channel.
Nigeria is the volume market and the loudest. The NCC counted 189.68 million active subscriptions in May 2026, with MTN and Airtel carrying roughly 86% between them. Underneath sits an instant payment system that carried 5.63 billion transfers worth ₦476.89 trillion in the first half of 2024 alone — and in Nigeria, a transaction that does not produce an alert is treated as a fault. Transaction messaging is not an add-on in that market; it is the part of a financial product customers see most.
Three regulators sit over those markets — the Communications Authority of Kenya, the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority and the Nigerian Communications Commission — and they do not share a rulebook. What may be sent, under whose name, and on what basis differs by country and changes on each country's own schedule. That is precisely the work an international sender does not want to own three times over, and it is the first thing worth talking through when you join the waitlist.
84.09M
Active mobile subscriptions in Kenya (CA, Q1 2026)
111.9M
Telecom subscriptions in Tanzania (TCRA, Q1 2026)
189.68M
Active mobile subscriptions in Nigeria (NCC, May 2026)
3
Regulators, and three different sets of rules
Smartphone assumptions travel badly
Smartphones are 63.7% of connected devices in Kenya and 42.5% penetration in Tanzania, while Nigerian access is overwhelmingly mobile across 189.68 million lines. A channel plan built on the assumption that everybody has an app installed quietly excludes a different fraction of the population in each country — and the fraction it excludes is usually the one you were trying to serve.
Numbers are not stored the way you think
Kenyan lists carry 07, 01, 254 and +254 versions of the same person; Tanzanian lists carry 06, 07 and 255; Nigerian lists carry 080 and 234. Anyone consolidating recipient data from three countries meets this on day one. It is dull work, it is entirely predictable, and it is the cheapest thing to get right before a launch rather than after one.
Payments
Settle in dollars — or in the currency of the country you are sending into
Buying from outside Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria, you are quoted and settle in US dollars, by card or bank transfer, on the same account as your regions. The option underneath is the useful one: each of the three countries has its own market on this site, its own price list in its own currency, and its own local rails — so a subsidiary in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos can be billed in shillings or Naira rather than made to find dollars.
Priced in USD, at launch
Rates are published when the product opens. 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.
Card or bank transfer
The two methods on an international account, in dollars, with one invoice covering messaging and infrastructure together rather than a separate supplier relationship for each country you send into.
Or bill the local entity locally
Kenyan and Tanzanian customers can settle in shillings, including by M-Pesa; Nigerian customers settle in Naira by transfer or card, inside Nigeria. For a group with operating companies in those countries, that is the difference between a local finance team approving a local invoice and chasing a dollar payment through a treasury queue.
Messaging carries no published rate card before launch — ask [email protected] to be told first. Displayed prices exclude VAT, which differs by country and 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, 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 141 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
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%
- 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.
Tax & invoicing
One supplier, three tax regimes underneath
The rates are not the same and the mechanics are not either. Kenya charges 16% VAT on digital supplies, administered by the Kenya Revenue Authority; Tanzania charges 18% on the mainland through the Tanzania Revenue Authority, with Zanzibar administering its own; Nigeria charges 7.5%, administered by the Nigeria Revenue Service. Buying internationally, you are invoiced in dollars and the local tax question only arises for the entities you choose to bill locally.
Where it does arise, the detail is country-specific in ways that surprise people. A Tanzanian buyer's input-tax claim turns on a receipt carrying a verification code under the EFD regime. A Nigerian buyer above ₦5 billion in turnover sits inside a mandatory e-invoicing regime enforced from 1 July 2026. A Kenyan buyer needs its own identifiers on the document before the first billing run, not after it. If you are consolidating group spend, tell [email protected] which entity is being billed where when you join the waitlist, and the billing accounts are configured once rather than corrected later.
Model volume, not rate
Messaging spend moves with your user count and your transaction count rather than with your server count, and it moves differently in each country — Nigerian alert volume per active user looks nothing like Tanzanian survey volume per field worker. Build the model on your own numbers now, and the rate card drops straight into it when it is published.
Data residency
Three data-protection laws, and all of them reach you
The recipient list is the problem. Every number on it identifies a person located in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria, the message body often states something about their money or their health, and the delivery log records when they were reached. That is personal data in all three countries — and each regime reaches processing carried out abroad. Kenya's Data Protection Act applies to a controller or processor not established in Kenya that processes personal data of data subjects located there. Sending from another continent does not put you outside any of this.
Beyond that the three diverge sharply, and the differences are the reason a single global answer does not survive contact with them. Kenya attaches conditions to transfers out of the country under sections 48 and 49, and Regulation 26 requires a serving copy in Kenya for a named list of purposes including basic education and primary or secondary healthcare. Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, in force since 1 May 2023, runs a prior-permit regime: personal data leaves the country on an application to the Commission, which may approve, ask for more, or refuse. Nigeria's Data Protection Act 2023 governs transfers under section 41, and the Central Bank's circular of 15 June 2026 directs that payment transaction data generated in Nigeria be stored and managed in Nigeria from 1 January 2027.
What a provider supplies against all of that is location. Lineserve runs ke-1a in Nairobi, tz-1a in Dar es Salaam and ng-1a in Lagos, on one account and one API, and messaging is being built to run in the same regions as the rest of your infrastructure. Hold each country's recipient list and message log in that country, and the cross-border question does not arise for it. Your obligations as a controller stay yours; they are a shorter pile of work when nothing crossed a border.
One region is not a plan for three countries
Serving all three markets from a single point somewhere convenient is a decision about three different legal regimes made once, by default, without anybody writing it down. The alternative is not complicated: deploy in the country whose citizens' data you are holding, and keep the group architecture identical everywhere else.
Who sends into these markets
What an international sender is actually sending
OTPs and login codes
A global platform with users in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos sends its highest-frequency message into the market it understands least. A delay is indistinguishable from a failure: the user taps resend, gives up, and shows up in your funnel as a signup that never completed — reported as a conversion problem rather than a delivery one.
Transaction alerts and payout confirmations
Remittance operators, payment platforms and marketplaces paying out to sellers all owe somebody a confirmation, and the expectation is set locally: Nigeria's instant payment system produced billions of transfers in half a year, and its customers judge a service by whether the alert arrived. Meeting that bar from another continent is the part that gets underestimated.
Delivery and dispatch notifications
Cross-border commerce and logistics operators need the last message to reach a person standing in a street in Mombasa, Mwanza or Ikeja — often on a handset with no data. Order confirmed, courier assigned, courier is outside, delivery failed and here is how to reschedule.
Appointment and repayment reminders
Insurers, health platforms, lenders and subscription products all run sequenced contact against a date. The sequence is the same everywhere; what changes by country is which channel carries it and whether the customer can answer through a dialled menu instead of calling you.
Survey and field-data collection
Development programmes, research organisations and donor-funded projects headquartered abroad collect data from respondents inside these countries — over SMS or a USSD session, because the respondent has no smartphone and no bundle. The response rate difference between that and a web form is the whole methodology.
USSD menus for a local audience
For a product serving customers who transact through dialled codes — savings, insurance, agricultural payouts, membership services — the menu is not a fallback channel. It is the interface most of the customer base will ever see, and building it is a decision about the market rather than about a feature list.
When it lands
What consolidating would look like
From several suppliers, one per country
The usual international arrangement is one supplier per market, each with its own contract, credentials, message format, reporting shape and definition of a failed delivery. Nothing about that is unreasonable — it is how the coverage was assembled. The cost is the layer your team wrote to paper over it, the reconciliation job that exists because two systems count differently, and the fact that nobody can answer a simple question about Tuesday's traffic without opening three dashboards.
From a global platform with a coverage row for each country
The other pattern is a single worldwide supplier where Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria are three lines on a rate sheet. That works until it does not, and the failure mode is specific: reporting that cannot tell you which network went quiet, support that does not know what a USSD session is for, and a bill in dollars that your Lagos entity cannot settle without spending its international card allowance. Before you move anything, split your own delivery data by country and by network, and see whether your current supplier can explain the weakest column.
Messaging is not open yet, so none of this is a switch you can make today. Join the waitlist at [email protected] and we will tell you when it is ready, what the first release covers, and which of the three markets it covers first.
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] with the countries you send into, the channels you care about and a rough monthly volume. Those three things shape the first release more than anything else.
Bulk SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD from one API and one dashboard. Which ships first, and in which markets, is what the waitlist will be told first.
Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria — the three countries Lineserve runs regions in. Anything beyond that would be a claim about arrangements rather than a plan, so the coverage detail is published at launch.
Rates are announced at launch, in US dollars on an international account or in local currency on a Kenyan, Tanzanian or Nigerian one. There is no messaging price on this site today.
Many companies do, and for a while it is the right answer. What it tends to miss is the local shape: USSD as a real channel rather than a curiosity, four networks in Tanzania where none has a majority, an alert culture in Nigeria that treats a missing notification as a fault, and three regulators whose rules move independently.
Sender identity is regulated country by country and the rules are not the same in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria. 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.
It depends on the country, the channel and what you are sending, and the answers differ across the three. It is one of the first things worth raising with the team, alongside your volumes, rather than something to settle from a web page.
In the region you deploy into: ke-1a in Nairobi, tz-1a in Dar es Salaam, ng-1a in Lagos. Recipient lists, message bodies and delivery logs are personal data under all three countries' laws, which is what makes their location worth deciding rather than inheriting.
Kenya's Data Protection Act reaches a controller or processor not established in Kenya that processes personal data of people located in Kenya, and the Tanzanian and Nigerian regimes have their own reach. Sending from another continent does not put a recipient list outside them.
That is the sane way to adopt any messaging platform: keep the traffic that must not blink where it works, move one stream, compare, then decide. Nothing about it requires a cut-over in a single weekend.
It is being built to live on the same account and the same API as ke-1a, tz-1a and ng-1a — one login, one billing profile, and an application talking to a messaging endpoint in the region it already runs in.
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 · Local billing in KES, TZS, NGN & UGX