M-Pesa
We get this request occasionally: build the app first, add M-Pesa later once we've validated the idea. It's understandable reasoning, but in the Kenyan market it usually backfires, because payment method isn't a feature you bolt on afterward — it shapes the entire user flow, and retrofitting it later is more expensive than building it in from day one.
For most Kenyan consumers and small businesses, M-Pesa isn't one option among several; it's the expected way to pay, full stop. An app that defaults to card payment and treats M-Pesa as an afterthought is asking users to work against their own habits, and in our experience that friction shows up directly in drop-off rates at checkout.
This is especially true for field-facing apps — sales, logistics, service delivery — where the person on the other end of the transaction may not have a bank card at all, but almost certainly has M-Pesa.
Safaricom's Daraja API itself is reasonably well documented for the happy path: initiate an STK push, receive a callback, confirm the transaction. Where it gets harder is everything around that happy path — handling callback timeouts, reconciling transactions when the callback never arrives, retry logic for a customer who cancels the prompt on their phone, and keeping an accurate ledger when M-Pesa's confirmation and your app's local state can briefly disagree.
We've built enough of these integrations to have a standard, battle-tested pattern for handling those edge cases — usually the difference between an app that mostly works and one that reconciles perfectly, every time.
A field sales or logistics app that only works with a strong signal isn't reliable in large parts of Kenya, and "the app was down" is not an answer your field team wants to give a customer. We build with a local-first data model in Flutter, so the app keeps working — including taking M-Pesa payment confirmations — and syncs automatically the moment connectivity returns.
Get both pieces right — native M-Pesa and true offline capability — and the app works the way the country actually operates, not the way a template built for another market assumes it should.
What we do
Cross-platform Flutter apps with M-Pesa payments, offline capability, and native performance.
Explore Mobile AppsKeep reading
If your finance team spends a day or more each week manually matching payment records across providers, the problem is architectural — not a lack of effort.
A 20-minute intro call is free. A 90-minute Paid Discovery Session is $500 / KES 25,000 — and ends with a clear, actionable roadmap for transforming how your business operates.
hello@biran.co.ke · WhatsApp: +2547142987206