Software for internet service providers
Billing, M-Pesa collections, hotspot, vouchers and your routers — in one place, set up in an afternoon. Uplink is built for the owner of a small internet business, not for a network engineer.
Your first 25 PPPoE subscribers are free. KES 400 one-off activation fee.
Illustrative figures. Your overview shows your own subscribers, routers and money.
Why operators choose Uplink
No technical skills needed. Create a workspace in two minutes, paste one command into a factory-fresh MikroTik, and Uplink configures the customer lines (PPPoE), the hotspot, the speed queues and its own secure management tunnel. A readiness check names anything still missing before you go live.
Money is kept as exact whole numbers in a ledger the database itself refuses to rewrite. One ISP's data is unreachable from another's. Backups are encrypted and shipped off-site nightly. And billing fails open: an empty Uplink balance never disconnects one of your subscribers.
Add routers, towns, staff and product lines without changing platform. Monthly lines (PPPoE) and hotspot on the same router, vouchers beside monthly plans, a role for every kind of employee, and an API with a published description for when you outgrow the screens.
From nothing to first sale
Your ISP's name, your country, your email. Billing, the customer portal, staff roles and your admin account exist the moment you press the button. Currency and clock follow the country you pick.
About 2 minutes
Answer one question — what will this router do? — and paste the setup command Uplink gives you. A stock MikroTik comes back fully configured: customer lines (PPPoE), hotspot on the bridge, speed queues, firewall hardening and a private tunnel so Uplink can reach it behind any connection, Starlink included.
Under 10 minutes, no console cable
Monthly plans with a speed and a price. Hotspot passes by the hour or the day. Voucher batches with printable QR cards for agents and shops. Written in plain words — "10 Mbps, KES 2,500 a month" — and pushed to the router for you.
As long as pricing takes you
Subscribers pay by M-Pesa to your paybill and are reconnected on the spot. Walk-ups buy a hotspot pass from a payment prompt on their phone (M-Pesa STK push). Invoices, receipts and reminders go out by SMS or email on your schedule, and every shilling lands in a ledger you can audit line by line.
Same day
Who it is for
Most operators run more than one of these at once. Uplink does not charge extra for the second.
Monthly subscriptions on a fixed speed, billed on a date you choose.
Walk-up internet sold by the hour, the day or the week.
Several towers, a team, and more moving parts than one person can hold.
Everything an ISP runs on
The same screens your team will use every day, named the way the console names them.
Monthly-line (PPPoE) and hotspot customers in one list. One page per customer with balance, sessions, invoices, tickets and devices. Suspend, restore and reconnect from one place.
Hotspot passes walk-ups buy themselves by M-Pesa. Voucher batches with QR cards. Leads, site surveys and quotations for the fibre side of the business.
Invoices with PDF, receipts matched to payments, tax handled, reminder-and-suspend ladders (dunning) that restore service automatically, and a double-entry ledger underneath it all.
Every router's health on one screen, alerts that name the router by SMS or email, private management tunnels, one central sign-in for every router (RADIUS) and live speed changes without a reboot.
Plans in plain language: speed, price, fair-use, grace days. Static and dynamic addressing, address pools that fill themselves, and changes that reach the router without a technician.
A helpdesk with response deadlines (SLA) stamped on every ticket, escalation when a deadline slips, and a daily digest so nothing breaches quietly.
Installation and repair jobs assigned to technicians. Billing starts when the job is completed, not when it was promised.
Routers, ONUs, cable and antennas in a stock ledger that only ever appends. Issue to a job, return from a job, never go negative by accident.
Fifteen ready-made roles from cashier to network engineer, custom permissions, a password check before money and exports, and a trail of who did what.
Your customers see their balance, invoices and usage, pay by M-Pesa and buy passes without calling you.
Collections, customers lost (churn), ageing, revenue by plan, router uptime. On screen, or as CSV whenever your accountant asks.
A REST API with keys and a published description, so an integrator can start before the first phone call.
System insights
The Overview is the screen you open first every morning. It answers the four questions an owner actually has, before the first cup of tea.
Underneath, nightly checks re-derive the ledger and the meter from first principles and record the result. When Uplink tells you a number, the proof is one click away.
Pricing
One line on the bill. No setup fee, no licence, no contract, no per-module add-ons, no support sold by the hour, no device caps.
PPPoE
KES 400 a month VAT included
A flat monthly Platform Fee for PPPoE service, and your first 25 PPPoE subscribers are free. Above that, KES 25 per additional average billable subscriber per month.
A billable PPPoE subscriber is one who is active, in grace or throttled — averaged over the days of the month, never a month-end snapshot. Suspended and cancelled PPPoE subscribers are not counted.
Hotspot
2% of hotspot revenue VAT included
A share of successful hotspot revenue, and no fixed monthly fee. If you only sell hotspot, that is the whole bill — there is no Platform Fee.
Running both? PPPoE charges plus 2% of hotspot revenue, on one invoice, with one Platform Fee.
What would you pay?
KES 2,275 per month
KES 400 platform fee, then 75 above the free 25 × KES 25
| Subscribers | You pay |
|---|---|
| 20 | KES 400 |
| 100 | KES 2,275 |
| 500 | KES 12,275 |
| 1,200 | KES 29,775 |
Shown in KES. Terms apply per workspace and are recorded on every fee entry, so a statement from last year still explains itself after a price change.
All prices include VAT at 16%. Your monthly tax invoice shows the net amount and the tax separately, so you can claim it back.
A prepaid Uplink balance you top up from an M-Pesa prompt on your phone (STK push), exactly like buying airtime. The fee is metered monthly and taken from the balance. If the balance runs dry, nothing happens to your subscribers: the fee waits as a visible receivable and settles on your next top-up.
Every new workspace starts on a 14-day trial with every feature on. When you are ready, activating the workspace costs a one-off KES 400 activation fee, paid by the same M-Pesa prompt as a top-up. It is charged once and never recurs. After that, below 25 PPPoE subscribers you pay only the KES 400 Platform Fee.
Uplink never holds your subscribers' payments. M-Pesa pays into your own paybill; Uplink only reads the confirmation and reconnects the customer. There is no custody wallet to wait on.
| On the bill | Typical ISP platforms | Uplink |
|---|---|---|
| Setup or onboarding fee | KES 5,000 – 50,000 | None |
| Monthly minimum or licence floor | Often USD 300 – 500 | KES 400 a month, with the first 25 PPPoE subscribers free |
| Annual contract | Common | None — leave any month, export everything |
| Per-module add-ons | CRM, tickets, inventory extra | All included |
| Support | Billed by the hour | Included |
| Custody of your collections | Through the vendor's wallet | Never — paid straight to your paybill |
| SMS | A surprise on the invoice | KES 0.50 per segment, published and itemised |
Proof, not promises
Uplink is new, so it does not have a wall of customer logos to show you. What it has instead is a system that checks itself, in public, every night — and an invoice you can take apart.
The monthly platform fee shows the collections and subscriber count it was computed from, and the terms in force that month. It is not a total you have to trust.
Automated checks re-derive the ledger and the meter from first principles overnight and record what they found. A disagreement is an alert, not a surprise at year end.
Who changed a plan, who took a payment, who refunded it, and when. Money entries are only ever added, never edited — a correction is a new entry that says so.
CSV exports of subscribers, invoices, payments and the ledger, on demand. Nothing about Uplink depends on your data being hard to get out.
Where Uplink works
Pick your country at signup and the currency, clock and phone formats follow. M-Pesa phone prompts (STK push) and paybill collections are live in Kenya; every other country runs the same billing, portal and network stack with its own currency, clock and phone formats.
Somewhere else? The platform is not locked to these ten — tell us where you operate and what you collect with.
Security and trust
Every row carries its owner and the database itself decides who may read it. Another operator's data is not hidden from you by a line of code that could be forgotten; it is unreachable.
Money is recorded in exact whole numbers, double-entry and append-only, with the permission to rewrite it withheld from the application itself. Corrections are new entries, and they say so.
M-Pesa credentials, router passwords and line sign-in secrets (PPPoE) are encrypted with rotating keys. Staff see that a secret is set, never the secret.
Refunds, exports and gateway settings ask for the password again. Sessions rotate, and a stolen session revokes the whole family.
Continuous archiving plus a nightly encrypted copy shipped to a second data centre, with the restore path exercised rather than assumed.
CSV exports of everything at any time, behind a password check. A closed workspace stays reopenable for 30 days, with exports reachable throughout, and personal data is purged on request without touching a single financial record.
Support
The same day. Creating a workspace takes about two minutes, a factory-fresh MikroTik is configured by one pasted command in under ten, and you can write your first plan and take your first payment straight afterwards. Nothing waits on us approving you.
No. Uplink was built for an owner with no technical background. Router setup is one pasted command; plans are written in plain words; and the console explains each step. An engineer is welcome, and will find the router configuration Uplink produces readable and conventional.
MikroTik running RouterOS 7, the standard in this market. A factory-fresh board is the easiest case: Uplink reclaims the default configuration and lays down its own. A router already in service can be added as unmanaged and brought under management later.
Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Zambia and Malawi. Currency, clock and phone formats follow the country you choose. M-Pesa collection is live in Kenya; elsewhere payments are recorded by your staff or through your own gateway.
PPPoE is a KES 400 monthly Platform Fee with your first 25 PPPoE subscribers free, then KES 25 per additional average billable subscriber per month. Hotspot is 2% of successful hotspot revenue with no fixed monthly fee, and a hotspot-only operator pays no Platform Fee. There is no setup fee, no licence, no contract and no per-module add-on. SMS is KES 0.50 per segment, itemised on your statement.
By M-Pesa, into your own paybill — Uplink reads the confirmation and reconnects the customer, usually before they have put the phone down. Walk-ups buy a hotspot pass from a payment prompt on their own phone. Cash and bank transfers are recorded by your staff and land in the same ledger.
Nothing your subscribers would notice. Authentication, payments and reconnection keep working. The fee waits as a receivable on your account and settles when you top up. A reserve keeps essential SMS sending.
Uplink notices the missing heartbeat and sends an alert that names the router and says how many subscribers it carries. A private management tunnel keeps the router reachable even behind a connection with no way in from outside, so a fix rarely needs a site visit.
Yes. Subscribers are added from the console one at a time, or in bulk through the API, and line sign-ins (PPPoE) can be set so nobody has to reconfigure a customer's router. A router already in service can be added as unmanaged and brought under management when you are ready.
There is no contract and no notice period. Export everything as CSV whenever you like, then ask us to close the workspace. A closed workspace stays reopenable for 30 days, with your exports reachable throughout, in case you change your mind.
The console and the subscriber portal are responsive web pages that work in any phone browser, including at a shop counter over 3G. There is no separate app to install or keep updated.
Create a workspace now. Paste one command into a router this afternoon. Sell internet tonight.
No card. Every feature on for 14 days, then KES 400 a month with your first 25 PPPoE subscribers free.