Deploying a WiFi captive portal with Mobile Money payments comes down to wiring three pieces together: a captive-portal-capable router, a page that sells access plans, and the payment APIs of the mobile operators. The customer joins the network, picks a plan, approves the charge from their phone and is online in under 60 seconds, with nobody standing at a counter. Allow three weeks between the technical site survey and the official launch.
Hardware and software for a captive portal with built-in payment
A captive portal with built-in payment needs four pieces of hardware and one software layer. The hardware is sized against the area to be covered and the number of simultaneous users you expect, never against the reseller’s catalogue: an undersized access point degrades the experience for everyone and pushes down the share of visitors who end up paying.
- A professional router with captive portal support
- WiFi access points covering the whole service area
- A stable internet connection, fibre or Starlink
- A UPS, so power cuts do not interrupt a paid service
The software layer carries everything else. The captive portal ships preconfigured with the payment gateway, the plan-selection page and the admin dashboard. From that dashboard you track daily, weekly and monthly revenue, the list of active users, the detail of every transaction and which plans actually sell.
Network configuration lives in the same place: bandwidth caps per plan, category-based site blocking, firewall rules and service opening hours. To pick hardware sized for your real site rather than a theoretical one, read our guide to choosing captive portal equipment.
How a Mobile Money payment works on the portal
A Mobile Money payment on a captive portal always follows the same sequence: the customer picks a plan, enters their number, receives an approval request on their phone, and watches access open as soon as the operator confirms the transaction. No cash to handle, no prepaid vouchers to print, no manual collection at the end of the day.
The details of the flow vary by operator. Orange Money, available in 17 African countries, pushes a payment prompt straight to the customer’s handset, who approves it with a PIN. MTN Mobile Money goes through a USSD menu the customer dials to confirm. Wave and Moov Money follow an equivalent path, by QR code or USSD depending on the country.
Bank cards round out the setup for customers with no Mobile Money account. The integration runs through Stripe or Paystack, accepts Visa and Mastercard, and enforces 3D Secure authentication. Those gateways charge more than Mobile Money operators, which makes the card a useful fallback rather than the main way an African captive portal collects money.
Which plans to sell on a captive portal, and at what price
A captive portal sells two families of plans: time-based and data-based. Time-based plans are the easiest to grasp for an audience that turns up for a short session, and they carry most of the revenue at walk-in locations where people connect once and move on.
- 1 hour: 200 FCFA
- 1 day: 500 FCFA
- 1 week: 2,000 FCFA
- 1 month: 5,000 FCFA
Data plans target regular customers who want to spread their usage across several days: 300 FCFA for 500 MB, 1,000 FCFA for 2 GB, 3,500 FCFA for 10 GB, and 6,000 FCFA for an unlimited month. The two price lists coexist without cannibalising each other, because they answer different needs.
Automatic promotions work on conversion without any effort from you: thirty free minutes on a first connection, half price between 2 pm and 4 pm to flatten network load, and a free hour for every friend referred. On a campus those mechanics matter — see our analysis of the business model of a captive portal on a student campus.
Payment security and the operator’s legal obligations
Security on a paying captive portal rests on encrypted channels and on the principle that no payment data travels or sits in plain text. Traffic runs over SSL/TLS, card transactions meet PCI-DSS compliance, and sensitive data is tokenised rather than stored as-is on the equipment installed at your site. A card number is replaced by a token, so an attacker who reaches the router finds nothing reusable.
User data protection follows both African regulations and the GDPR. Connection logs are anonymised after 30 days, user data is encrypted, collection is subject to explicit consent at the moment of sign-up on the portal, and the right to erasure is honoured on request.
A WiFi network operator finally carries three legal duties: keeping connection logs, generally for six months, filtering illegal content where the law requires it, and registering the activity with the national telecoms regulator. These steps belong before the service opens, not after the first incident.
What deployment costs and when it pays for itself
A turnkey deployment costs between 2,000,000 and 3,500,000 FCFA, including hardware, professional installation and training. Monthly running costs land between 45,000 and 60,000 FCFA for the internet subscription, electricity and maintenance. Observed revenue ranges from 70,000 to 120,000 FCFA per month depending on the location, the footfall and the quality of day-to-day management.
Those three figures give the net monthly margin: from 10,000 FCFA at a quiet site to 75,000 FCFA at a busy one. Payback time is the initial investment divided by that margin. In other words, it is the real traffic at the location, not the hardware you buy, that decides how fast the site pays for itself.
The commissioning schedule fits into three weeks: site survey, coverage study and hardware order in week one; access point installation, portal configuration and payment testing in week two; training, a soft launch and then the official opening in week three. To put these amounts in a concrete setting, read our analysis of a captive portal in an African neighbourhood and of the passive income a WiFi network generates.
