M-Pesa Paybill vs Till for ISPs

How to use this

1. Enter your monthly payment profile. Average ticket size, monthly payment count, and how many distinct subscribers pay you.
2. Set phone-reuse expectation. How often one phone pays for more than one subscriber account. 5-15% is typical for residential ISPs.
3. Read the recommendation. The advisor shows monthly fees for both products and recommends one with a one-sentence reason.

How it works

Paybill fees are tiered by transaction size and published by Safaricom Business¹. A typical KES 2,000 payment falls in the KES 1,501-2,500 band and currently incurs KES 32 from the merchant. Multiplied across hundreds of subscribers, the monthly bill is meaningful.

Till (Lipa na M-Pesa Buy Goods) carries no merchant fee on most tiers - the cost is instead paid by the subscriber in their M-Pesa transaction charge. The cash arrives in one bucket, attached only to the paying phone number.

The Daraja API delivers the account number for Paybill payments on every C2B callback². That field lets FyberPay (or your own integration) credit the right subscriber automatically. Till callbacks do not include an account number, so reconciliation falls back to phone-number matching.

In a Kenyan ISP context

Across the Kenyan ISP segment, Communications Authority sector statistics³ show fixed-broadband ARPU in the KES 2,000-4,000 range for residential service. At those ticket sizes, Paybill fees are 32-67 KES per payment. Most ISPs of meaningful size run Paybill because the reconciliation cost of Till - a customer-service queue arguing about lost payments - far exceeds the fees saved. Small operators (one shop, walk-in only) often still pick Till because the volume is too low for fees to matter.

FAQ

Which is cheaper, Paybill or Till?

Till (Lipa na M-Pesa Buy Goods) typically carries no merchant fee on most tiers, while Paybill always has a per-transaction fee that scales with amount. For an ISP collecting KES 2,000/month from 200 subscribers, Paybill fees can run KES 6,000-12,000/month. Till saves that fee but costs you reconciliation time.

Can I reconcile Till payments to subscriber accounts?

Only by phone number, and only if every subscriber pays from their own phone. The moment a relative pays or a household shares one phone, the mapping breaks. Paybill solves this with the account number field - Safaricom carries it on every Daraja callback.

What is Bill Manager Paybill?

Bill Manager is a Safaricom product where Safaricom pays the Paybill transaction fee on your behalf in exchange for invoicing through their system. It is useful for ISPs that want zero per-payment cost but it constrains how invoices are generated.