Description

Tsevele is a subscription-based digital content platform whose development I led. The central technical challenge was building a reliable recurring subscription model in a market where the dominant payment methods  mobile money above all  were never designed for automatic periodic billing. The solution required an architecture for subscription lifecycle management, content access control tied to payment status, and careful handling of failures and renewals.

My Role and Contributions

• Project Leadership: Coordinated the development team and drove technical architecture decisions across the full product cycle.

• Subscription Architecture: Designed the backend and data model underpinning subscription plans for e-books and video content, with state management and renewals.

• Payment Integrations: Implemented M-Pesa and Paystack, covering local and regional payments with automatic reconciliation.

• Mobile APIs: Built the APIs powering content consumption on mobile devices, with access validation against active subscriptions.

Key Features

• Digital Content Library: Catalogue of e-books and video organised by category, with access gated by subscription status.

• Subscription Management: Plans with different durations and access levels, with automatic activation, renewal and expiry control.

• Local and Regional Payments: M-Pesa for the Mozambican market and Paystack for pan-African reach.

• Content Protection: Secure content delivery with access validation on every request, preventing unauthorised distribution.

Technologies Used

• Backend: Laravel with a RESTful API, scheduled tasks for subscription lifecycle management and queues for payment processing.

• Database: MySQL with subscription state modelling and a complete transaction history.

• Frontend: Responsive interface optimised for reading and viewing content on any device.

• Payments: M-Pesa and Paystack APIs with webhook handling and automatic reconciliation.

Results and Impact

• Recurring Revenue Model: Made recurring subscriptions viable in a market where payment is predominantly one-off and mobile-money based.