Messaging — coming soon in Nigeria
Coming soonBulk SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD for Nigeria
Nigeria counted 189.68 million active mobile subscriptions in May 2026 — more than Kenya and Tanzania together. Behind them sits a payments system that generates a message for almost everything it does: NIBSS carried 5.63 billion instant transfers in the first half of 2024 alone.
- Coming soon — join the waitlist
- SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD from one API
- Quoted in Naira when it launches, on the account your Lagos servers run on
- Data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act (NDPA) — your data stays in-country
Launching soon · Billed in 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 networks
Two networks carry most of Nigeria, and everything runs on mobile
The NCC's May 2026 count puts MTN Nigeria on 96.98 million active subscriptions and 51.19% of lines, Airtel on 65.45 million and 34.55%, Globacom on 23.4 million and 12.39%, and T2 — the operator most people still call 9mobile — holding most of the rest. Two networks carry roughly 86% of the country, which makes Nigeria the opposite of Tanzania's four-way split and a market where your recipient list has a predictable shape. It also means a fault on one network is a fault for half your customers at once, so the reporting that tells you which half went quiet matters more here, not less.
Fixed connectivity barely enters the picture. Licensed ISPs counted 352,006 active subscribers at the end of 2025 — Spectranet, Starlink, FiberOne, ipNX, Tizeti and the rest — against 189.68 million mobile subscriptions. That is offices, not customers. Whoever you are reaching in Lagos, Kano or Port Harcourt is on a handset.
Which is why Nigeria's relationship with USSD is different from anywhere else on this site. Here the dialled code is a banking interface: a customer moves money, checks a balance and buys airtime through a short code on a phone with no data connection, and has done for years. That habit shapes what people expect from every other service too. A menu they can dial reads as normal, not as a fallback for people without smartphones.
The regulator is the Nigerian Communications Commission, which licenses the sector and publishes the subscriber statistics this page quotes. What may be sent to a Nigerian handset, under whose name and on what basis, is decided here rather than in Nairobi or Dar es Salaam, and the three countries do not share a rulebook. Bring your requirements to the waitlist conversation and they get worked through properly rather than assumed.
189.68M
Active mobile subscriptions in Nigeria (NCC, May 2026)
~86%
Share of active lines held by the two largest networks
5.63bn
Instant transfers on NIP in H1 2024 (NIBSS)
352,006
Active licensed ISP subscribers, Q4 2025 — the fixed layer
The alert is the relationship
Nigerians judge a financial service by whether the alert arrives. Money left the account and nothing buzzed is a support ticket, a tweet and often a lost customer, whether or not the transaction itself succeeded. For a Nigerian fintech, messaging is the part of the product the customer sees most often.
Ask what happens to the ones that fail
The question to put to any messaging supplier is not what share of messages arrive. It is what they can tell you about the ones that did not — per network, per message, in a form your own system can act on and your support desk can quote back to a customer. Ask it of everyone you shortlist, us included.
Payments
In Naira, on domestic rails, without touching your card allowance
Nigeria settles by transfer. NIBSS has run the NIP instant payment scheme since 2011, and it carried 5.63 billion transactions worth ₦476.89 trillion in the first half of 2024, up 39% in value on the half before. Cards sit second and matter. That is how this market moves money, and it is how a Lineserve invoice is settled here — a Naira amount, by transfer or card, inside Nigeria.
Priced in Naira, at launch
Rates are published when the product opens, in NGN, from a Nigerian price list rather than a dollar figure converted at the moment you click. A messaging bill scales with your traffic, so a currency that re-prices itself against your revenue every month is the last thing you want under it.
Bank transfer, or card
Transfer is the default for Nigerian business and the route almost every purchase with an approval behind it takes — one payment, one reference, reconciled. Visa and Mastercard are charged in Naira for the teams that would rather keep a card on file than raise a transfer instruction every thirty days.
The allowance you are not spending
A Naira card carries a bank-set ceiling on international spending, and Nigerian businesses ration that headroom across a year — licences, ad spend, the one supplier who takes dollars and nothing else. A monthly dollar bill from an overseas messaging platform takes a bite out of it twelve times a year. Settling in Naira inside Nigeria leaves the headroom where it is.
Messaging carries no published rate card before launch — ask [email protected] to be told first. Displayed prices across the site exclude VAT; Nigeria's 7.5% 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
Lagos is home. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam are one API call away.
Deploy in los1 and the machine sits in Lagos, in the same city as most of the traffic it will ever serve. Nigeria makes that easy to reason about: 189.68 million active mobile subscriptions in May 2026, with MTN and Airtel together carrying about 86% of active lines and Globacom and T2 — the operator formerly branded 9mobile — behind them. Whichever of the four your customer is on, they are in Nigeria, and typical in-metro round trips here run around 4 ms.
Nigerian networks now hand traffic to each other in Nigeria. IXPN, the neutral national exchange founded in 2006 by the NCC, runs 13 points of presence across 7 states and more than 130 connected networks, with 400G-capable core switching at three Lagos sites; peak domestic traffic across it passed 1 Tbps in April 2025 and 2 Tbps by March 2026. Before it existed, two Nigerian networks exchanged packets by way of London — an intercontinental journey for a packet crossing one city.
Eight subsea systems come ashore in the country, Equiano landing on the Lagos coast in 2022 and 2Africa at Lekki, which is how Lagos became West Africa's arrival point for international capacity. Aim a request at Frankfurt or Virginia instead and that subsea path joins the critical route of every call the page makes, at typically around 110 to 125 ms before your application does any work. From Lagos, Accra and Nairobi typically sit further away in round-trip terms than London, because traffic between African networks still frequently transits Europe.
nbo1 in Nairobi and dar1 in Dar es Salaam run on the same account and the same API, which makes a standby or a disaster-recovery plan a configuration rather than a second supplier. Make that call deliberately where personal data is involved: a copy of Nigerian personal data held abroad is a cross-border transfer under section 41 of the NDPA. Machine images and telemetry raise no such question.
Nigeria
Lagos
~4 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Nigeria
Kenya
Nairobi
~2 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Kenya
Tanzania
Dar es Salaam
~6 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Tanzania
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
West Africa Time, and a ticket that arrives with the facts
Two channels, doing different jobs. A ticket opened while signed in arrives carrying your account, your region and the instance, so the first reply is about the problem rather than about which machine you mean. [email protected] is the commercial address: a quotation against a purchase order, transfer details before a payment run, the billing account configured with your TIN and registered name before the first invoice, and the SLA terms and credit-claim process in writing while you are still choosing.
Before either, status.lineserve.net. Anything affecting a whole region is posted there faster than a reply could reach you, and checking it turns "my site is down" into "my instance is unreachable and the status page is clear" — a different ticket, and a much shorter one.
What to put in it, in the order it gets read: the region and the instance, the time the behaviour started in WAT, what changed just before it, the actual error text rather than a description of it, and whether it reproduces from more than one Nigerian network. An MTN handset and an office fibre line disagreeing is a different fault from both failing together.
Some of the fastest resolutions need nobody at all, and are worth knowing before the night you need them. Restore an on-demand snapshot. Roll back to a scheduled backup. Open the browser console when SSH is the thing that has broken. Resize or rebuild from the API. Migration planning and assistance are included at no extra charge.
Nigeria runs on West Africa Time, UTC+1, and does not observe daylight saving — two hours behind Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. A change window agreed in WAT means the same thing in January and in July. Note the offset when you schedule across regions.
Sales
[email protected]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
7.5% VAT, and an invoice built for the 2026 regime
Nigerian VAT on cloud and hosting services is 7.5%, administered by the Nigeria Revenue Service — the authority most buyers still call FIRS. It is the lowest rate of the three markets Lineserve operates in: Kenya charges 16% and Tanzania 18% on the same class of service. Messaging will be quoted the way everything else here is, exclusive of VAT with the 7.5% shown separately, so the figure in your budget line and the figure on the quote match.
The rate is the easy part. Nigeria's tax framework changed on 1 January 2026 with the Nigeria Tax Act 2025 and the Nigeria Tax Administration Act 2025, and two consequences reach a supplier invoice directly. A TIN is now central to how a transaction is evidenced. And large taxpayers — turnover above ₦5 billion — sit inside the Revenue Service's mandatory e-invoicing regime, enforced from 1 July 2026, with onboarding through an approved Access Point Provider. In that phase, a supplier invoice that will not reconcile into your fiscal flow is a procurement problem rather than an accounting detail.
Send five fields once
Your TIN, your registered name exactly as the Revenue Service holds it, the billing address, a billing email that reaches finance rather than an engineer, and any purchase-order or cost-centre reference that has to appear on the document. Send them to [email protected] when you join the waitlist and the billing account is configured once rather than corrected later.
Model the volume before the rate exists
Messaging spend moves with your transaction count, not with your server count. Work out now how many alerts an active customer generates a month, how many OTPs per signup attempt, how many reminders per unpaid invoice, and the rate card drops into a model that is already built when it is published.
Data residency
Your message log sits next to your payment data
Think about what a Nigerian alert stream actually contains. A phone number, which identifies a person. A message body that frequently states an amount, a balance, a merchant or a reference. A timestamp against each one. Held together and retained, that is a readable history of a customer's financial life, generated as a by-product of telling them what happened to their money.
On 15 June 2026 the Central Bank of Nigeria issued circular PSS/DIR/PUB/CIR/001/004, introducing market structure requirements, data localisation, beneficial ownership disclosure and systemic oversight measures across the Nigerian payments system. It directs that payment transaction data generated within Nigeria be stored and managed in Nigeria, with full compliance from 1 January 2027, and it reaches banks, microfinance banks, mobile money operators, fintechs, switching companies, payment service providers and super agents. The affected data is reported to include merchant records, transaction identifiers, timestamps, settlement information and processing logs. If you sit inside that perimeter, ask your compliance function early where the notification layer lands in their analysis — a message log is not obviously outside it.
Around that sits the general regime: the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, and the General Application and Implementation Directive issued on 20 March 2025 and effective from 19 September 2025. Section 41 governs the transfer of personal data out of Nigeria, permitting it where the recipient is covered by an adequate law, binding corporate rules, contractual clauses, a code of conduct or a certification mechanism. Hold the recipient list and the message log in los1, in Lagos, and that analysis does not arise for them. That is data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act; the controller obligations stay yours, and they are a shorter pile of work when nothing crossed a border.
Procurement asks before the regulator does
In Nigerian fintech the residency question usually arrives through a partner bank's vendor review rather than through an enforcement letter — a questionnaire asking which country the data sits in and who else can reach it. Having a one-sentence answer is worth more at that moment than any amount of architecture diagram.
What Nigeria sends
The message types this market runs on
OTPs and login codes
The message where a delay is indistinguishable from a failure. The customer taps resend, gives up, and calls a support line already busy with the last outage. At Nigerian signup volumes this is the highest-frequency message most platforms send, and the one where a per-network problem shows up as an abandoned funnel before anybody reads a report.
Transaction and debit alerts
The Nigerian message type. Every credit, debit, reversal and failed charge across a system carrying billions of instant transfers a year is expected to produce a notification within seconds. Ledgers, switching platforms, super agents and merchant acquirers generate this stream continuously, and its sheer volume is why a Nigerian sender thinks about unit cost before features.
Betting confirmations and agent terminals
One of Nigeria's largest online sectors, and the most abrupt workload on this page: odds updates all day, then a bet-placement spike at kickoff that lasts ninety seconds and is felt by the punter directly. Add thousands of retail agent terminals confirming stakes and settlements against the same backend, and per-state reporting since regulation moved to the states.
Delivery and dispatch notifications
Nigerian retail has the sharpest seasonal shape of any market on this site — a peak starting in late October, running through Black Friday and the December weeks, holding into January. Order confirmed, rider assigned, rider is outside, delivery failed and here is how to reschedule: four messages that decide whether somebody orders again, at several times the usual volume for eight weeks.
Repayment reminders and collections
Lenders, asset financiers, insurers and HMOs run on sequenced contact: a reminder before the date, a nudge on it, an escalation after, and a self-service route for the customer who wants to check a balance rather than speak to anyone. In Nigeria that route is very often a dialled menu, because the customer who is short of money is also short of data.
Exam windows, surveys and field collection
A national exam date is not a traffic forecast, it is a date in the diary — results, registration confirmations and reminders to millions of candidates in a few hours. Alongside it sits the quieter work: survey and field-data collection over SMS and USSD, where the respondent needs nothing they do not already have.
When it lands
What moving would look like
From an aggregator you already use
Nobody swaps a live OTP path on a Tuesday, and nobody should. The realistic shape is parallel: keep the existing supplier for traffic that must not blink, move one low-stakes stream first, and compare what comes back. The work in between is known. Normalise your numbers to one format, since Nigerian lists carry 080, 234 and +234 versions of the same person. Inventory your templates and which system emits each. And carry your opt-out list across intact — that is the one file you cannot rebuild.
From a dollar-billed platform abroad
This is the argument that lands hardest in Lagos. A messaging bill scales with your transaction count, so an overseas supplier turns your busiest month into your worst exchange-rate exposure, twelve times a year, against the same international card allowance you need for everything else that only takes dollars. Settling in Naira on domestic rails removes both problems at once — and moves the message log itself into the country the payment data is already required to sit in.
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 and what the first release covers.
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 channels you care about, the kind of messages you send and a rough monthly volume. That last figure is the useful one — it shapes the first release.
Bulk SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD from one API and one dashboard. Which ships first, and in what order, is what the waitlist will be told first.
Rates are announced at launch, in Naira. There is no messaging price on this site today.
Reaching every network a Nigerian customer might be on is the problem this is being built around. MTN and Airtel carry roughly 86% of active lines between them, but the remaining lines are somebody's customers too. How that coverage is delivered will be published when the product opens.
Sender identity is regulated country by country and the rules differ. 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.
No. You would be settling a Naira amount inside Nigeria, by transfer or card, so it sits outside the international spending cap your bank applies to a Naira card. A dollar invoice from a platform abroad sits inside that cap, every month it renews.
It is how a great deal of this country moves money — a dialled code, a PIN, no data connection required. Nigerians are more used to transacting through a menu than through an app, which makes a dialled interface a normal thing to offer rather than a concession.
That is what los1 is for. Lagos is where Nigerian customers' data is held today for every live Lineserve product, and messaging is being built to run there too. Recipient lists, message bodies and delivery logs are personal data under the NDPA.
That is a question for your compliance function rather than for a hosting page. What is clear is the direction: circular PSS/DIR/PUB/CIR/001/004 requires payment transaction data generated in Nigeria to be stored and managed in Nigeria from 1 January 2027, and an alert stream carries transaction identifiers, timestamps and amounts. Ask early where your advisers place it.
The contracting entity is LINESERVE, INC. What is in Nigeria is the infrastructure: region los1 in Lagos, billing in Naira, and data held in the country.
Nigeria runs on West Africa Time, UTC+1, with no daylight saving — two hours behind Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Reach the team at [email protected] or through the ticket system, and note the offset when you diary a change window.
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 · Billed in NGN