How Much Does M-PESA Integration Cost in Kenya?

"How much to add M-PESA to my site?" is my most-asked question. The API itself is free — what you're paying for is the engineering to make it work reliably. Here's the honest breakdown.

What Safaricom charges

The Daraja API itself costs nothing — no setup fee, no monthly fee. You pay per transaction: standard M-PESA tariffs apply on the till/paybill side (roughly 0.5–3% depending on transaction type and volume). Safaricom doesn't charge developers; they charge the business on the transaction.

What the development costs

• Basic STK Push — KES 30,000–80,000. One prompt, one callback, payment recorded. Right for a simple checkout or donation button.
• Production integration — KES 80,000–200,000. STK Push + C2B validation/confirmation, transaction status queries, reconciliation, idempotent callbacks, admin reporting. What a real business needs.
• Full payment suite — KES 200,000+. B2C payouts, reversal handling, multi-till support, automated reconciliation, dispute tooling.

What you're actually paying for

Not the API call — that's an afternoon. You're paying for everything around it: token caching, timeout handling, the user who closes the prompt, the callback that arrives twice, the payment Safaricom says succeeded but your DB missed. That's the difference between "works in the demo" and "works in December."

I've written about the technical implementation and why it matters for Kenyan platforms. For a scoped quote on your platform, see the M-PESA integration page or send me your setup.