Mobile money is the API you're missing: shipping payments in Cameroon with CamPay

A developer building AI products for the Cameroonian market integrated CamPay, a payment gateway connecting apps to MTN Mobile Money and Orange Money, into two live products: CVBoost, an AI CV tailoring tool, and WardWatch, a civic issue reporting app. The developer reports that mobile money, with tens of millions of users, is effectively the payment API in Cameroon, and that the main implementation costs were sandbox testing, idempotent webhook handling for duplicate deliveries, and receipt UX matching mobile money expectations.

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.