Your students pay with M-Pesa. Your platform should take it.
We build learning platforms for people who sell what they know. Courses, cohorts, certificates, memberships. Built by a team that runs one, not a team that read about one.
Three ways a good course quietly loses money.
None of these are about video quality. They are all about plumbing, and plumbing is what nobody wants to think about until the money stops arriving.
The checkout does not speak Kenyan
Most course platforms were built for a card economy. Your buyer has M-Pesa on their phone and no card in their pocket. They want to buy. The checkout says no. You never find out, because a person who cannot pay does not send an email.
WhatsApp is not a platform
Groups, Drive links, manual code sharing, certificates typed one by one. It works at twenty students. At two hundred it is a full time job, and it is your job, which means you have stopped teaching and started doing admin.
You are renting your own audience
On someone else's platform you do not own the list, the data, the pricing rules, or the relationship. You pay in dollars, forever, for the privilege. The day their terms change, your business changes with them.
We do not build learning platforms. We run them.
Any agency can build you an LMS. Almost none of them have sold a course, chased a failed M-Pesa callback at midnight, or issued four hundred certificates on a Sunday. We have trained over 5,000 students on platforms we built ourselves. Every mistake below is one we already paid for.
Our own school. Cohorts and recorded courses, sold and delivered to thousands of students.
Micro learning with an instructor marketplace, corporate seats and institutional accounts.
On demand library. Passwordless entry, course player, progress tracking, certificates.
Client platform. Quiz driven discounts, custom enrolment logic, live and running.
Three people use a learning platform. We build for all three.
Most platforms are designed for the student and then bolt on an admin panel that nobody enjoys. The instructor and the admin are the ones using it every day. They get designed for too.
- Pays with M-PesaTill or paybill, plus card and Paystack for everyone else. The checkout does not decide who is allowed to buy.
- Passwordless entryA code to their phone or email. No password to forget, no reset flow, no support message on a Sunday.
- Course playerVideo, sections, notes, downloads, resume where you left off, works on a cheap Android on mobile data.
- Cohort playerLive classes with a schedule, a join link, recordings that appear after, and the notes attached.
- Quizzes and progressPass marks, retakes, a progress bar that means something.
- CertificateIssued on completion, with their name on it, verifiable by a link.
- Upload without calling usCourses, sections, lessons, files. If you need us to add a lesson, we built it wrong.
- Cohort schedulingSet the dates, the cap, the price. Enrolment closes itself when it is full.
- Drip and release rulesOpen lesson four on day four. Lock the certificate until the quiz is passed.
- Student list and messagingWho paid, who showed up, who stalled at lesson two. Email or WhatsApp them from one place.
- Bulk certificatesFour hundred names, one action. We built this because we needed it.
- Revenue shareIf you run a marketplace, each instructor sees their own earnings and nothing else.
- Money that reconcilesEvery payment matched to a student and a course. M-Pesa callbacks handled properly, including the ones that fail.
- Coupons and pricing rulesAnchor price, launch price, early bird, quiz based discounts, group rates.
- Abandoned checkout recoveryThey started paying and stopped. That is a real list and it is worth money.
- Corporate and institutional seatsOne buyer, forty learners, one invoice, one dashboard.
- Email that arrivesWelcome, receipt, reminder, certificate. On your domain, sent through Resend, not a plugin.
- Numbers you act onEnrolments, completion rate, where students quit, revenue per course. Not vanity charts.
Before you spend anything, check whether this pays back.
A learning platform is a real investment and it does not make sense for everyone. Put your own numbers in. We would rather you talk yourself out of it here than six weeks in.
After the KES 12,600 a month it costs to host, watch and support it.
This is not for everyone, and we will tell you early.
- A coach or trainer already selling, and hitting the ceiling of WhatsApp
- A training company running repeat cohorts
- A college or institution with a real student intake
- A firm training staff or partners at scale
- An association issuing certificates people care about
- Anyone whose buyers reach for M-Pesa first
- Not yet selling anything. Build the audience first, the platform second
- Running one course for twelve people. Use a WhatsApp group, honestly
- Hoping the platform will create the demand
- Unable to keep content coming after launch
- Looking for the cheapest quote in the market
If it is too early, there is a real alternative.
You can list your course on darasa.my, our own platform, and sell to Kenyan students on M-Pesa today without building anything. Prove the demand there. When the revenue justifies your own platform, come back and we will build it. That order costs you less and we would rather say this now than take your money for something you are not ready for.
Two to eight weeks. Never a stunt.
Our website offer runs on a different clock. A learning platform is a different animal and we will not pretend otherwise. Payments, student data and certificates are things that have to be right, not fast.
Scoping sprint
We map your courses, your money flow and your students. You leave with a written spec, the screens drawn, and a fixed quote. Paid, and yours to keep even if you never build with us.
Core build
Accounts, course structure, the player, the checkout. M-Pesa goes in first, not last, because it is the part most likely to surprise us and we want the surprise early.
The rest of the business
Certificates, email, coupons, cohorts, the admin views, the reports. You are in the build by now, clicking it, breaking it, telling us what is wrong while it is still cheap to fix.
Pilot and launch
Your content goes in. We run one real cohort or one real sale through it end to end, with real money, before we call it live. Then we hand over the keys and train your team.
Fixed quote after the sprint. Never before.
Anyone who prices a learning platform from a WhatsApp message is guessing, and you pay for the guess later. These are the bands we build in. The sprint turns a band into one number.
- Deployed on the engine behind Click2Skill, not built from zero
- Your brand, your domain, your database
- Recorded courses, unlimited
- M-Pesa, card and Paystack checkout
- Passwordless student login
- Course player with progress
- Certificates on completion
- Transactional email on your domain
- Admin dashboard and reports
- Everything in Basic
- Live cohorts, schedules and caps
- Quizzes, pass marks and retakes
- Drip and release rules
- Bulk certificate issuance
- Coupons and pricing rules
- Abandoned checkout recovery
- Student messaging from one place
- Everything in Cohort
- Multiple instructors with revenue share
- Instructor onboarding and payouts
- Corporate and institutional seats
- One buyer, many learners, one invoice
- Role based access across your team
- API or integration into what you already run
The scoping sprint. One week, one price, yours to keep.
A written spec, the screens drawn, the money flow mapped, and a fixed quote for the build. If you take it to another agency we will not chase you. If you build it with us, the fee comes off the price.
Running it, after launch
Hosting, backups, payment monitoring, support and small changes. A platform that takes money needs someone watching it. This is not optional and we will not pretend it is.
The ones people actually ask us.
Why not just use Teachable, Kajabi or Thinkific?
Use them, if they fit. They are good products. But they were built for a card economy, they bill you in dollars forever, and the pricing rules that work in Kenya are not the rules they support.
The honest test is the calculator above. If your buyers pay by card and you are happy renting, a hosted platform is cheaper and you should not talk to us. If your buyers reach for M-Pesa, you are losing sales you never see.
Can you not just do Moodle or a WordPress plugin?
We can, and sometimes we will say you should. Moodle is serious software if you have someone to run it. A plugin stack is cheap until the day four plugins disagree and your checkout goes down during a launch.
The sprint is where this gets decided honestly. If a plugin is the right answer for you, we will say so in week one rather than sell you a build.
Does it really take M-Pesa properly?
Yes. Till or paybill, with the callback handled properly, including the failures. That last part is the part everyone gets wrong. A payment that succeeds on the phone and never reaches your platform is worse than no payment, because now your student is angry and you are doing forensics in a spreadsheet.
Do I own it?
Yes. Your code, your database, your domain, your student list. Handed over on launch. The monthly fee is for running it, not for holding it hostage. If you leave, you leave with everything.
What if I do not have content ready?
Then we are early and we will say so. The platform is not the hard part. The content and the audience are the hard part, and no build fixes an empty course. Come back when you have something to sell, or start on darasa.my and prove it there first.
Why does the sprint cost money?
Because it produces something. A spec, the screens, a fixed quote, and an honest answer about whether to build at all. Free quotes are guesses dressed up as documents, and the guess always gets corrected later, at your expense.
Can you migrate students from what I use now?
Usually. Students, courses, purchase history and progress, depending on what your current platform will export. We scope this in week one because it is the thing most likely to surprise both of us.
Start with the maths.
Then start the sprint.
Tell us what you teach and who buys it. We will tell you in the first conversation whether you should build this at all.