Introduction Last updated: 2023-04-02

ShortCodes are special Five digit numbers, significantly shorter and easy to remember numbers unlike the normal telephone numbers eg. 22138, 21441 that are used to facilitated communication on mobile phones. Shortcodes can be configured in a number of ways depending on your desired interaction and the need of use.

Zero rate:Your consumer is not billed for any interactions over the shortcode and you meet the cost of the messaging
Normal rate:Your consumer is charged at the rate of their subscribed tariff, with no additional cost to you, all cost is taken care by the subscribed consumer
Premium rate:Your consumer is billed at an agreed and set rate higher than their normal tariff

Billing can be done on MO – Mobile origination, where if your consumer does not have the required airtime balance they will not access the service (excellent for upfront content purchases, opinion polls and lotteries ) or MT – Mobile Termination, where consumers can access the service with fulfilment and billing happening as the content or response is delivered ( excellent for subscription based services ).

Use Cases

Some of the use cases include the following

Entertainment

Send customized entertainment updates to your subscribers and generate revenue. Share local content, news updates or music files with ease

Collect Feedback

An effective way to conduct surveys is by using SMS. Send questions to your users and give them the platform to answer back and provide valuable feedback.

Notification Services

Add instant notifications to your applications to inform your clients when important events are generated. Sample scenarios include financial transactions, reminders or sharing updates with your users

Revenue Share

The amount you can earn from the premium content send to your subscribers is based on the following:

SMS Volume
Cost Per SMS

On the total volume revenue 33.4% goes to the Government of Kenya before the below deduction by PRS (Safaricom)

Summary

Price Range	Service Provider Share(Safaricom)
Ksh Inclusive Taxes	0 – 100,000	100,001 – 1,000,000	above 1,000,001
0.00 – 1.00	0%	0%	0%
1.01 – 5.00	20%	50%	60%
above 5.00	50%	60%	70%

After the above deductions, the revenue that remaining is what gets to you as the client at the end of the month after the stats are shared by Safaricom

Pricing

Cost to getting started with Shortcodes

Dedicated Shortcodes

Telcos	Set Up	Monthly Maintenance per Telco
Safaricom	KES 30,000	KES 15,000

Note

Prices are 16% VAT exclusive

Set up fee is a prepayment for the first two months

Shared Shortcode (Price Per Keyword)

Set Up (Per Keyword)	Monthly Maintenance
KES 5,000	KES 2,000

Getting Started

You want to get started with this services?

Request Shortcode

We provide a restful API to perform the following actions on our shortcode services.

Schedule content
Activate subscribes(subscribe manage)
View active subscribers

Swagger Link: https://sub.mobitechtechnologies.com/swagger-ui/index.html

To get your shortcode request by following the following steps.

Step 1
Create an account on mobitech: https://vas.mobitechtechnologies.com/site/register

Step 2
Log in to your account https://vas.mobitechtechnologies.com/site/login

Access the mobitech platform shortcode section as shown in red.

Note: To make api calls , you need to get your API key. To get your api key,

Step 1. Click on top right corner dropdown next your company name as indicated by 1 in the above screen shot. Step 2. Click on My Account [..] as shown as 2 in the above screenshot. Step 3. You will find your api key as shown below.

Note: API key is passed as a header h_api_key during an api call. API calls refer to the swagger: https://sub.mobitechtechnologies.com/swagger-ui/index.html

APIs

You can integrate to our powerful platform via RESTful API

Through api integration, you will able to achieve the following:

Subscribe Users
Schedule premium sms
Get deliveries in real time
Get your subscribers from the telcos in realtime

Getting started

To get started with our API.

Login in to your account. Login
Go to your company profile.
Copy the secret api Key as shown
Whitelist IP addresses where the api request will be coming from.(An extra security feature).You can have more than 1 IP address separated by a comma.

Subscribe a phone number

You can subscribe a given phone number to your service.The user being subscribed has to give consent to be subscribed to your keyword and shortcode.

To subscribe via API

API Request

URL Endpoint: http://subapi.mobitechtechnologies.co.ke/api/subscription-request
Authorization Header: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

Request Body


  {
  "callbackURL": "string",
  "offerId": 0,
  "subscriber": "2547000000",
  "type": "ACTIVATE"
  }

callbackURL	This is a URL , in which every status changes of the request
offerId	Your keyword id from your dashboard catlog
subscriber	Your target subscriber phone number , must start with the country code e.g 25475654XXX
type	This specifies the action. ACTIVATE a subscription.

Response


{
  "callbackURL": "string",
  "dateCreated": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
  "dateModified": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
  "id": 0,
  "offerId": 0,
  "status": "string",
  "subscriber": "string",
  "type": "ACTIVATE"
}

Send out SMS content

Sending premium sms to your subscribers

API Request (POST Request)

URL Endpoint: http://subapi.mobitechtechnologies.co.ke/api/messages
Authorization Header: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

Request Body


{
  "callbackURL": "string",
  "content": "string",
  "offerId": 0,
  "scheduledTime": "2021-03-01 10:00:00"
}

callbackURL	This is a URL , in which every status changes of the request is send to including, but limited to deliveries and failure statuses
offerId	Your keyword id from your dashboard catlog , where the content is scheduled for.
content	The premium message to be send out. Note(Max 160 characters)
scheduledTime	When the message should be send out in the date format: 2021-03-01 10:00:00

Response


{
  "dateModified": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
  "id": 0,
  "status": "Scheduled",
  "scheduledTime": "2021-03-01 10:00:00"
}

SMS Stats and Deliveries

Checking the individual premium sms stats

Note: Every change in your sms sending state to your subscribers is being pushed to the callback url provided when sms content was being scheduled or any request made with a callback url

Checking message stats

This gives details on how many messages has been sent out and how many have delivered successfully to your subscribers.

URL Endpoint: http://subapi.mobitechtechnologies.co.ke/api/messages/{id}/stats
Authorization Header: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

Required Param

{id} - id of the message to check for its stats

Response


{
  "dateCreated": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
  "dateModified": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
  "delivered": 0,
  "messageId": 0,
  "totalSent": 0
}

Checking message deliveries

This gives delivery status including the number of times the message has been retried, if the first try did not successfully get to your subscriber.

URL Endpoint: http://subapi.mobitechtechnologies.co.ke/api/messages/{id}/receipts
Authorization Header: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

Required Param

{id} - id of the message to check for its delivery status

Response


[
  {
    "dateCreated": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
    "dateModified": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
    "retries": 0,
    "smsId": 0,
    "status": 0,
    "statusDescription": "string",
    "subscriber": "string"
  }
]

Keywords

Access the list of offer or rather keywords.

URL Endpoint: http://subapi.mobitechtechnologies.co.ke/api/offers
Authorization Header: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

Required Param

{id} - id of the message to check for its delivery status

Response


[
  {
    "dateModified": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
    "id": 0,
    "keyword": "string",
    "offerCode": "string",
    "offerName": "string",
    "rate": 0,
    "shortCode": "string",
    "status": "Active"
  }
]

keyword	You keyword name e.g newsalert
offerCode	Unique Id assigned to your keyword by the provider
rate	The rate in Ksh (The cost of your content per sms)
shortcode	The shortcode which your keyword is associated with e.g 22136

Subscribers

Get a list of all your subscribers per keyword.

URL Endpoint: http://subapi.mobitechtechnologies.co.ke/api/offers/{id}/subscriptions
Authorization Header: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

Required Param

{id} - id of offer (keyword)

Response


[
  {
    "dateCreated": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
    "dateModified": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
    "effectiveTime": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
    "expiryTime": "2021-03-01 10:00:00",
    "offerId": 0,
    "status": 0,
    "statusDescription": "string",
    "subscriber": "string"
  }
]

subscriber	Your subscriber mobile number e.g 2547000000
offerId	Keyword Id

Interactive Swagger API Docs

Note

You can interact with our API using swagger Swagger Link .

Contact

Need help?
Reach us through:

Email	info@mobitechtechnologies.com [Subject: Subscription API]
Phone	254702739804 254722158772