Small ISP Billing in Kenya: Your First 200 Customers

Starting Small Doesn't Mean Starting Wrong

Many Kenyan ISPs start with 20 to 50 subscribers and scale from there. The temptation is to handle billing manually at first — tracking payments in a WhatsApp group or an Excel sheet. That works for about a month. Then it becomes chaos.

The question is not whether you will need a billing system. It is how much money you lose before you get one.

What Manual Billing Actually Costs You

The cost is rarely a single dramatic loss. It is steady leakage:

• Subscribers who stop paying but stay connected. If you disconnect by hand, you disconnect late. Two subscribers on a KSh 2,000 package staying online one extra month each is KSh 4,000 gone, and it repeats.
• Payments you cannot match. An M-Pesa message with a slightly different name, and you either cut off a paying customer or credit the wrong account.
• Your evenings. Reconciling payments and toggling PPPoE secrets by hand is hours per week that should go into selling connections.
• Reconnection delay. A customer who pays at 9pm and waits until morning is a customer telling their neighbours your service is unreliable.

What a Small ISP Needs in a Billing System

You do not need enterprise software. You do need:

• M-Pesa collection that matches payments to subscribers automatically
• MikroTik integration for automatic disconnection and reconnection
• A subscriber list you can manage yourself, without a developer
• SMS notifications so customers know their package is expiring before it does
• Pricing that does not eat your margin at low subscriber counts

Anything beyond that — multi-tenant hierarchies, complex tax reporting, CRM pipelines — is weight you do not need yet.

What It Costs at Your Size

Look for per-subscriber pricing so you only pay for what you use. Jasiyo charges KSh 25 per active PPPoE subscriber per month, with a single KSh 1,000 monthly minimum across your account.

That minimum matters at small scale, so it is worth being plain about it. At 20 subscribers your usage works out to KSh 500, but you pay the KSh 1,000 minimum. You reach the point where usage exceeds the minimum at 40 subscribers. From there the bill simply tracks your business: 100 subscribers is KSh 2,500, 200 is KSh 5,000.

There is also a one-time KSh 250 onboarding fee, charged when you set up your account, and a 7-day free trial after it.

Set that against what you are losing to manual billing. One subscriber staying connected a month past their expiry usually costs more than the whole monthly bill.

Avoid These Common Mistakes

Using Excel for billing. It works until a payment gets missed or a formula breaks. A missed disconnection means free internet for someone who has not paid.

Manually reconciling M-Pesa. Reading your M-Pesa messages to find payments takes hours and still produces errors.

No automation. If you are connecting and disconnecting subscribers on MikroTik by hand, that is time that should go into growing the network.

Waiting until it hurts. Migrating 40 subscribers takes an afternoon. Migrating 300 while firefighting takes a week you do not have.

Getting Set Up

With a cloud-based system, setup is straightforward. You name your router, let the system scan it to see what is already configured, choose whether to keep your existing setup or build a fresh one, then paste a single generated script into the MikroTik terminal. That installs a small agent which connects outward to the platform, so you do not need a public IP, an open port, or a RADIUS server.

After that you create your packages, link your M-Pesa Paybill or Till, and import your subscriber list. Most small ISPs are live the same day.

See the quick-start guide → or read the full pricing breakdown →