Questions about bulk SMS, surveys, USSD and WhatsApp in Kenya

Mobile Sasa is a Kenyan messaging platform run by Bitwise Digital Solutions Ltd in Nairobi since 2015. One account gives you bulk SMS on every Kenyan network, mobile surveys and SMS questionnaires, USSD codes, shortcodes and keywords, premium SMS subscriptions, the WhatsApp Business API, scheduled reminders, phone number lookup and email, with a delivery report for every message.

Register at account.mobilesasa.com with your organisation name, email and phone number. The account is ready in minutes and you can send straight away under the shared MOBILESASA sender name while your own sender ID is registered.

Yes. Every new account gets 10 free SMS, the full portal and the API to explore. There is no card, no contract and no setup fee. After that you top up and pay only for what you send.

No. Mobile Sasa is prepaid with no monthly commitment and no minimum spend. Larger organisations can ask for a postpaid account and settle at month end.

Schools, SACCOs, banks, hospitals, county governments, churches, retailers, radio and TV stations, NGOs and software companies. More than 2,000 organisations send through the platform.

Yes. Invite team members, give each a role, and optionally organise the account into departments. Every action is recorded in an audit log.

KES 0.60 per SMS for up to 50,000 messages a month, KES 0.40 from 50,001 to 500,000, KES 0.35 from 500,001 to 2,000,000, and KES 0.25 above 2,000,000. The same price applies on every network and every price includes VAT. The volume discount applies automatically to what you send in a calendar month.

No. There is no subscription to use the platform. You pay a one-time registration for each sender ID, and monthly fees only for things you rent: dedicated shortcodes, keywords on a shared shortcode, and USSD codes or extensions.

Pay by M-Pesa to paybill 4078003 using your account number from the portal, start an M-Pesa prompt from inside the portal, or pay by card or bank through PesaPal. Payments credit your account automatically once confirmed, usually within a minute.

Most payments credit within a minute of Safaricom confirming them. If an hour passes, send us the M-Pesa transaction code by WhatsApp or email and we match it to your account by hand.

Yes. Every payment has a receipt under Billing in the portal. For a VAT invoice, email the amount and your KRA PIN to [email protected].

A standard SMS holds 160 characters. Longer messages are split into parts of 153 characters each and every part is billed as one SMS. Messages with emoji or some special characters use Unicode, which holds 70 characters per message. The portal shows the part count and exact cost before you send.

No. Units and wallet money stay on your account until you use them.

All Kenyan networks: Safaricom, Airtel, Telkom and Equitel. You send to a phone number and the platform works out the network and the best route, including numbers that have moved between networks.

Most messages reach the handset within 3 to 5 seconds of being sent. Large campaigns are queued and released at the speed each network accepts, so a campaign of 100,000 messages still goes out within minutes.

Every message gets a delivery report from the network: delivered, failed with the reason, or still pending. You see it per message in the portal, in campaign reports, through the API and, if you set a callback URL, pushed to your own system.

Yes. Upload a CSV or Excel file and use any column as a placeholder, such as {{name}}, {{balance}} or {{due_date}}. Each person receives their own text. The API has a personalised bulk endpoint for the same thing.

Yes. Choose a date and time and the campaign sends itself. You can edit or cancel it any time before it goes.

Recipients who reply STOP are added to your blacklist automatically and left out of every future send from the portal, campaigns and the API. You can also add numbers to the blacklist yourself.

Yes. Keep contacts in groups, import them from Excel or CSV, and send to one or several groups at once. Duplicates and blacklisted numbers are removed before the send is priced.

Transactional messages are ones a customer expects, like OTPs, receipts and alerts, and can be sent at any time. Promotional messages are offers and marketing, which Kenyan networks only deliver between 6:00 and 18:00. Your sender ID is registered as one or the other.

A sender ID is the name a recipient sees instead of a phone number, for example your school, SACCO or company name, up to 11 characters. It tells people the message is really from you.

We register it with each network on your behalf. Safaricom usually takes two to three working days and the other networks a little longer. You are notified as each network approves it, and until then you can send under the shared MOBILESASA name.

Request it from the portal with the name you want and the kind of messages you will send, and upload the supporting documents the portal asks for. We tell you if a network needs anything more.

Yes. Request as many as you need, for example one per brand or branch, and choose which one each message or campaign goes out under.

An SMS survey asks questions by text message and records each reply as an answer. The respondent texts back a number or a word, the next question arrives automatically, and you see results live. It reaches every phone in Kenya, including basic phones with no internet.

In any combination of four ways: you send the survey to a list of numbers, they text a keyword to a shortcode, they dial a USSD code, or they open a web link or scan a QR code. All answers land in the same results.

Yes or No, Multiple Choice where they pick one, Multiple Choice where they pick several, a Range such as 1 to 10, Open Ended number answers, and Open Ended free text. Choices are numbered for the respondent, and 1 or Yes, 2 or No are both accepted.

Yes. Add a follow-up to any Yes or No, Multiple Choice or Range question. For example, ask everyone who answers No why not, or ask detractors on a 1 to 10 scale what would make it a 10. The follow-up only goes to people whose answer matches.

Yes. Use a Range question from 1 to 10. Results are grouped into detractors (1 to 5), passive (6 to 7) and promoters (8 to 10) with the score shown, and each group can get its own follow-up question.

When you send a survey to people, you can open with a permission question: Yes, No or Stop future surveys, in your own words. People who choose Stop are never sent surveys from that shortcode again, though they can still join by keyword, USSD or web link.

Yes. Each send has its own name, such as Quarter 1 2026, with its own schedule and optional closing time, and its own report. You can view results for one send or the whole survey.

Results update live: counts and percentages per option, averages and bands for ranges, and every respondent's full conversation. Export everything to an Excel workbook with a summary sheet whenever you need it.

Yes. The built-in simulator plays the survey exactly as a respondent would see it, including the permission question, so you can check every path before anyone receives it.

USSD is the menu that appears when someone dials a code such as *657*27#. It works on every phone, including basic phones with no data, and needs no app. SACCOs, banks, schools and anyone serving customers without smartphones use it for balances, registration, payments, voting and surveys.

A dedicated code is registered to you alone and carries your brand, but takes longer to set up with the networks. A shared extension such as *657*01# runs on our shared code, which is already live, so you can launch in days at a lower monthly fee.

No. Build menus, inputs and messages in the portal menu builder, or point the code at a survey. If you have your own system, callback mode forwards every dial and keypress to your server and returns your reply to the phone.

Codes and extensions are rented monthly and renew from your Mobile Sasa wallet, so the service never lapses because an invoice was missed. Every renewal is listed in your wallet history.

Yes. The simulator behaves like a phone dialling your code, with the same menus and session flow, so you can walk every branch first.

A shortcode is a short number such as 20973 that people text to reach you. With a keyword, for example WIN or JOIN, every message sent to that word arrives in your account, gets an instant auto-reply if you set one, and can be forwarded to your own system.

A keyword on our shared shortcode is the fast, low-cost start and is live within days. A dedicated shortcode makes the number itself your brand and every message to it yours, which suits high-volume and premium services.

Yes, it is one of the most common uses. Entries arrive by keyword, everyone gets a confirmation within seconds, and you export the entries to pick winners. Radio and TV stations also get hourly engagement reports per show.

Yes. Set a callback URL on the keyword and every message is forwarded to your endpoint as it arrives, signed so you can verify it came from us.

Premium SMS lets subscribers pay for content, such as tips, news or alerts, from their airtime. They subscribe by keyword, the network charges each renewal, and you earn a share of the revenue.

Revenue is shared in published bands based on the charge per SMS and your monthly volume. Earnings settle to your wallet after the network pays out for the month, and every activation and renewal shows in your dashboard.

Joining is a recorded double opt-in, every subscriber has a timestamped consent record, and STOP ends the subscription with the network immediately, as the Communications Authority of Kenya requires.

Yes. Mobile Sasa connects directly to Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform. Messages go out through an approved WhatsApp Business number, not an unofficial gateway that risks being blocked.

Start on the Mobile Sasa WhatsApp number straight away with no Meta setup, have us register your own business number on our account, or connect a WhatsApp Business account you already run in your own Meta developer app.

On a number we manage, each message is billed at the published rate for its category: marketing, utility or authentication. If you bring your own Meta app, Mobile Sasa charges a small platform fee per message and Meta bills you directly for the conversation.

WhatsApp requires business-initiated messages to use templates reviewed by Meta, which keeps the channel free of spam. You write templates in the portal with a guided editor, submit them to Meta and see the review result, usually within minutes.

Yes. Replies arrive in the WhatsApp inbox in your portal, and delivery and read receipts show for every message you send.

Yes. Set up daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or end-of-month reminders at the time you choose, to a group or to a list where every person has their own message, such as amounts and due dates.

Add contacts with their dates or import a CSV, write the message once, and each person receives it on their day every year, with their name filled in.

Safaricom replaces subscriber numbers with a scrambled 64-character code, a SHA-256 hash, in some reports and event feeds to protect privacy. The same number always gives the same hash.

Often, yes. The lookup tool matches a hash against numbers the platform has handled and returns the phone number and its network. A hash we cannot match costs nothing, and the first three matches each day are free in the portal.

Yes. Upload a CSV or Excel file of hashes and receive a file of hash and phone number pairs by email and on your Downloads page.

Yes. Verify your domain, then send transactional email through the API or email campaigns from the portal, with opens, clicks and bounces tracked, billed from the same account as your SMS.

Yes. A REST API sends single, bulk and personalised SMS, checks your balance, reads delivery reports and manages contacts, surveys, USSD, WhatsApp and lookups. Documentation with curl, Node, PHP and Go examples is at docs.mobilesasa.com.

Create an API token in the portal and send it as a Bearer token. Tokens can be limited to the actions they need. High-volume senders can connect over SMPP instead of HTTP.

No. The /v1 and /v2 endpoints are frozen, so what you build keeps working. New features are added alongside them.

Yes. Set a callback URL and every delivery report is posted to it with your own tracking ID, signed with your account secret so you can verify it.

Yes. There is a ready ERPNext integration, and any system that can make an HTTP request can use the API.

Mobile Sasa operates under the Kenya Data Protection Act 2019. Data is encrypted, API tokens are stored hashed, access is by role, logins can require a second factor, and every action is written to an audit log.

Mobile Sasa sends through direct connections with the Kenyan networks and follows the Communications Authority of Kenya rules on sender IDs, opt-outs, promotional hours and premium consent.

A team administrator can delete the account from Settings in the portal or the app, confirmed with a password and an emailed code. The steps and what we keep by law are on our Account Deletion page.

Yes. Join the free agent programme and earn commission of up to 20 percent of your clients' SMS top-ups, credited the moment they pay and withdrawable to M-Pesa.

Yes. Through Salamu, our white-label platform, resellers run their own branded SMS business on Mobile Sasa with their own prices and customers.

WhatsApp or call 0796 002 630, or email [email protected]. We answer Monday to Friday 8:00 to 18:00 and Saturday 9:00 to 13:00, East Africa Time. Sending is monitored around the clock.

IPS Building, 6th Floor, Kimathi Street, Nairobi. Mobile Sasa is a product of Bitwise Digital Solutions Ltd.