# Mobile money is the API you're missing: shipping payments in Cameroon with CamPay > Source: > Published: 2026-10-08 09:12:42+00:00 Every tutorial assumes your users have a credit card. In Cameroon, that assumption quietly drops most of your market before the first payment screen ever renders. I build small AI products for the Cameroonian market, and both of them — CVBoost (AI CV tailoring) and WardWatch (civic issue reporting) — take payments through **CamPay**, a gateway that connects your app to **MTN Mobile Money and Orange Money**. No cards required. The usual path is: Stripe → "we don't support Cameroon" → a side quest into payment politics. The pragmatic path is CamPay. Same gateway, two very different products, one lesson: in Cameroon, mobile money *is* the payment API. It has ~tens of millions of users and it's how people actually pay for things every day. Compared to card rails, the pattern you're signing up for is a redirect flow: The parts that quietly take time: sandbox testing, idempotent webhook handling (the same webhook *will* arrive twice), and receipt UX that matches what users expect from mobile money — short confirmations, not invoices. Neither product ships payments as an afterthought bolted on after launch: The paid tier existed before the product was polished to death — because in this market, the *ability to pay* is a feature, not an admin chore. Both products are live if you want to see the flows: Feedback welcome — especially from developers who have shipped payments in markets their payment-provider docs forgot.