Billing and payments

Billing and payments covers Mailvora's plans, invoices and M-Pesa payment. Every price is a flat monthly amount in Kenyan shillings (KES), whatever the usage within the plan's limits.

#Plans

Upgrades apply immediately with a prorated invoice. Downgrades and cancellations apply at the end of the paid period. Operators can change prices, limits and visibility under Plans & pricing; issued invoices keep the price they were issued with.

#Paying an invoice with M-Pesa

1. The owner or a billing admin opens the invoice under Billing and enters a Safaricom number.
2. Mailvora asks PesaTide to send an STK push; the payer approves it on the phone with their M-Pesa PIN.
3. PesaTide confirms through a signed webhook (X-PesaTide-Signature, HMAC-SHA256 of the raw body). The payment page also polls the status, so the result appears even if the webhook is delayed.
4. The invoice is marked paid with the M-Pesa receipt number, and the event is recorded in the audit log.

Final states (paid, failed, cancelled, expired) are never overwritten, so repeated or out-of-order webhooks are harmless. A payment request expires after ten minutes, and only one can be in progress per invoice at a time.

#Setting up PesaTide

1. Create a live API key in the PesaTide dashboard.
2. Set PESATIDE_API_KEY, PESATIDE_API_SECRET, PESATIDE_WEBHOOK_SECRET and, if you have one, PESATIDE_ROUTE_ID (see Configuration).
3. Bind the webhook URL https://api.<your-domain>/v1/payments/pesatide/webhook to the key.
4. Pay a test invoice of KES 1 to prove the flow end to end.

#Invoices and reminders

Renewals, overdue reminders and grace-period handling run automatically in the API worker (BILLING_DUE_DAYS, BILLING_GRACE_DAYS). Invoices are emailed to the billing contact with a link to the billing page and can be printed or saved as PDF from the browser.

#See also

• Administrator guide
• Configuration
• Decision log (D-033)