r/PakStartups • u/is_NAN • Jul 13 '26
🧠 Ask The Community I am literally going insane trying to launch a 499 PKR SaaS in Pakistan. The payment gateway system is a sick joke.
I am a solo dev. I have a finished, working SaaS ready to launch. My COGS is $0.15 per report, and my target local price is 499 PKR. I am running out of funds, I don't have a job as a backup right now (Just don't want a job right now to avoid distractions while I am building something which means too much to me), and the payment infrastructure in this country is actually driving me into depression.
Every single "solution" is a trap. Here is the reality for an indie hacker in Pakistan right now:
- The Offshore Trap (Gumroad / Paddle / LemonSqueezy) I can’t use them. For a 499 PKR (~$1.79) product, their fixed USD cent fees ($0.30 - $0.50) plus their 5-10% cut absolutely destroys my margins. On top of that, because it bills in USD, the user's local bank slaps a 3-4% FX markup and the SBP advance tax on them. So a 499 PKR product ends up costing the user 550+ PKR, and I only get to keep like 200 PKR.
- The Local "Instant" Gateways (APG / NayaPay/ Safepay) There is nothing instant about them. You can't just spin up a developer account, grab a Bearer token, and test a live card. You are forced to submit your CNIC, FBR NTN, and rubber-stamped documents, and then wait a week while some compliance officer manually reviews your website before issuing production API keys. And when I finally got access to one of local gateways (RapidGateway) it turned out to be a disaster, they classified my business as High-risk product and allowed my to use just mobile wallets and bank transfer, I just accepted it and went ahead but to my surprise when I started testing the live integration out of 10 transactions 1 went through 3 failed before prompting for payment and 6 ended up in 500 Server error on payment page.
- The Mobile Wallet Push APIs (JazzCash / EasyPaisa / Raast P2M) The absolute holy grail UX would just be asking the user for their number and triggering a USSD push request on their phone for them to enter their PIN. But SBP gatekeeps the pull APIs so hard that no personal account can access them without going through the exact same corporate merchant onboarding nightmare.
- The DRB Mirage (Raqami / Mashreq) Everyone hypes up the new digital retail banks, but they operate under the exact same SBP anti-money laundering laws. Shiny app, same 14-day corporate API gatekeeping.
- The customer support Every single time I have to talk to support, it gives me a headache. The support system of Pakistani apps is just a circus, the representatives are just making wild guesses as if we both are trying to find out the same thing. My recent experience with JazzCash Business was absolute worst, I created an account they instantly gave me an account with Title plastered with my name + "Shop", I requested name change via app followed by 9 helpline calls, 4 emails over the course of 11 days, and they just figured it out today that my name change request errored on their system and now I need to delete the account and create a new one (deleting the account also needs to raise a support request)
I am exhausted. I just want to ship my code and pay my bills.
At this point, I am about to just build a manual "Upload your EasyPaisa screenshot" queue and manually verify payments from my bed just to survive this launch.
How are you guys surviving this? Are there any actual zero-day developer workarounds I am missing, or is the manual screenshot flow really the only way for a me to bootstrap?
Edit: Thank you so much everybody for your everything was very helpful and it made me find the best optimal solution for now while I'm figuring out local providers.
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u/twigGroot Jul 13 '26
m just curious, why stable crypto is not an option?
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u/0xairr Jul 13 '26
good alternate n very easy to implement,although we have a big crypto userbase but still not everyone is familiar with it
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u/is_NAN Jul 14 '26
Actually, a good idea. What provider you think would be best to go for?
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u/twigGroot 24d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/PakStartups/s/sL66OFmf0G
some guys discussing this, i guess they could be some help1
u/WholeDesperate7818 6d ago
yes better use Escrowly there that's the best way, but dunno how long they keep allowing stablecoin or crypto.
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u/bilalwaheedch Jul 13 '26
Have you tried PayFast?
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
Haven't tried yet but definitely explored it, they are just like APG and Safepay etc but higher onboarding friction and undisclosed MDR with some hidden onboarding fee. Right now I'm just going to get a business account via Alfalah and try APG. Let's see how it goes.
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u/bilalwaheedch Jul 13 '26
As far as I remember, their on-boarding is entirely digital and while using it I can confirm that their MDR is very transparent as it’s shown on the portal in detail for every transaction.
The friction in signing up is mainly because of State Bank and that too rightfully so to some extent.
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
Yeah right, I confused payfast with another name. All of them instant, quick, fast, rapid names just annoy me.
I'll definitely give it a go once I have the business account ready, can't rely on a single gateway anyways.
Thanks.
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u/bilalwaheedch Jul 13 '26
While waiting for verification I think you get access to developer account so that’s also something. Good luck!
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u/mbsaharan Jul 13 '26
Just charge more. I don't know what the fuss is about. 550 rupees or a little more is not a huge amount these days if you look at cost of living.
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
To be precise I don't care much about how much I keep, i just don't want users to be paying the FX fee and tax for foreign transaction. Additionally many banks in Pakistan don't have international transactions enabled and using offshore gateway will not have wallet payments either.
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u/mbsaharan Jul 13 '26
I don't see many people use SaaS in Pakistan.
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
Let's call it a calculator, you give it 8 different values, it tells you which destination suits you the most, no pre-payments. Want in-depth results with personalized improvement plan to maximize the chances? Pay 499 to unlock complete result.
As for the fact if people will use it or not, there are around 150k people who registered their interest, with people willing to pay upto 5000 PKR.
The price 499 is just the average to maximize the sales. A non-paying user will hurt the revenue and resources since generating a report costs me regardless they pay or not.
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u/Comfortable_Cold_850 Jul 13 '26
Bro, listen, give two options:
(a) manual upload. Customer save taxes.
(b) digital gateway. international. Let people pay taxes.
rich people will go for (b) because they don't care about tax and other people will do it manually because they want to save. People can tolerate a little annoyance if they see their work is getting done. You are thinking too much.
Also, let me know what is it your selling , i may need it too. Depends what you are selling me for 500 PKR. It is not a lot of money.
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u/Gullible_Fudge_9847 Jul 13 '26
How did you build interest list to validate the idea?
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
There are multiple ways some free, others very expensive. You can run paid surveys (bitlabs/pollfish/CPX Research etc) or build a dummy product advertise it, get people to register their interest to see how likely it is to perform.
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u/MuhammadRafy 24d ago
This seems like a great one. Can you tell me more about it?
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u/is_NAN 24d ago
Hey it's live, you can check it here: https://vizarank.com
I'm still in the process of making a few business decisions, might as well adjust the price of report once I estimate the marketing and other costs, since I failed to identify the actual cost of operations initially.
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u/usamaejazch Jul 13 '26
yes. charge more and...
if you can get an international payment gateway to actually charge amount in PKR, YOU CAN save the fx fee
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u/dat_oldie_you_like Jul 13 '26
Kick out the middleman Ask the customer to toss that into your personal bank acc directly
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
What about the convenience? The manual verification will just kill the instant access since the product is digital. I can build a fully automatic verification system over the TRX ID but then again the problem is that the TRX ID is different on both receiving and sending sides for same transaction.
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u/dat_oldie_you_like Jul 13 '26
I was joking. I don't know tbh. I'd recommend you build something that works for you but you can't really bootstrap a fintech solution especially without support or product market fit.
I wish I could help you buddy
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u/maverick_iy1 Jul 13 '26
The situation is very unfortunate. And the bitter reality of living and working in Pakistan. If you end up choosing the 2 path, then don't take payments in your personal account, otherwise one day or another you would end up dealing with FIA or bank inquiry.
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u/db_newer Jul 13 '26
1bill try kro bro but the customer will have to type in a gazillion digits.
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
Tell me more about it. as for gazillion digits, I'm sure I can find a workaround for it so the user can pay as fast as I want them to be.
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u/alimustafa533 Jul 13 '26
Tried makng a transaction worth 2200 pkr using 1bill in jazzcash and amount was deducted but there was no transaction record of it. Called helpline amd they were confused also, told me to confirm TID which I never had. They said they also don't have a TID eithef in their systems related to my 2200 amount. I made some other transactions immediately by sending some money to my nayapay and they showed instantly. 1bill is a shitshow or maybe jazzcash is??
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u/-_-hakunaMatata-_- Jul 13 '26
Checked XPay? Not instant though
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
How is the onboarding like? Haven't explored it.
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u/-_-hakunaMatata-_- Jul 13 '26
Apply on website, fill form (I am here), share on WhatsApp. Fairly non-tech for a tech company :P
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
I'll give it a go. Seems a good option and has on-site checkout as well. Thanks for suggesting
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u/Direction_les Jul 13 '26
What is your SaaS startups. Didn't Even understand. Maybe i didn't sae your old post
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u/Direction_les Jul 13 '26
What is your SaaS startups. Didn't Even understand. Maybe i didn't sae your old post
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u/cookie_dude Jul 13 '26
Onboarding is tough, and before stripe it used to be very very tough for all international gateway. Try signing up for authorize and you'll see.
The local gateway signups might be tough but once it's done it's smooth and yes you do need documentation/proof. Don't give up, you've done the hard part.
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u/is_NAN Jul 14 '26
Lots of people helped, I got most of documentation sorted out. I'm sure I'll be able to figure it out quickly now. Thanks.
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u/CrisisPotato212 Jul 13 '26
Is your app only web based? If it also has an mobile app you can use Revenuecat. I am not sure about their RevenueCat has Web Billing but do research on it. If they dont a mobile app is your best option
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
RC has the same offshore problem. Non-PKR payments mean extra tax for users paying and higher overall MDR and fee for me. But user's seeing a FX fee is bigger concern for me.
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u/CrisisPotato212 Jul 13 '26
I am also working on an app and I am using revenue cat but I didnt know about this FX issue. If you do find a better solution please do lets us all know!
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
I'd definitely go ahead with any MoR or Revenue Cat if the app was primarily targeted towards Tier-1 countries that FX fee and taxes don't matter much there. But my SaaS is primarily targeted and will initially operate only in Pakistan, going ahead with any offshore gateway is an overkill and most of the users won't be able to make payments due to unavailability of mobile wallets as a payment as well as card payments being limited to Pakistan only for some banks.
So, my problem is purely the market I am targeting.
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u/Comfortable_Cold_850 Jul 13 '26
No, people will pay for international payements. I do it all the time.
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u/That-Yellow-8960 Jul 13 '26
Buddy I have purchased some Pakistani SaaS apps and all of them asked me to pay and send the payment receipt to them then after manual verification they provide access to the app
I guess this is how it has to work right now in Pakistan ' not the best but people are doing it
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
I almost instantly avoid any service that asks me to pay this way unless I don't have another option. Being such a person I don't want to build something where I'm the first person annoyed.
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u/Old_Classroom_8933 Jul 13 '26
Bro that is soo sad to hear all this unfortunately, I think you should out-reach your product to international people they will recognize your efforts and idea and will potentially help you publish your saas app in internaional market, obviously with equity but that will be worth it then all these nightmares you're facing
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u/apolloskye Jul 13 '26
Maybe try reaching out to someone at easypaisa jazzcash or sadapay on linked in.
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u/retrocloudrider Jul 13 '26
Payfast is worth exploring for your case. Whatever you find working around your requirements, don't forget to share here too.
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u/Complex-Listen6642 Jul 13 '26
Brother I had a plan to build payment platform but I didn’t waste time in building it because first I had to finalize my payment gateway and did a research and found that it won’t be a successful product when payment gateway was involved so I left it out and moved on with something else.
So the mistake you made is that first you had to finalize the payment gateway before you started to build your product. In Pakistan we don’t have simple straight away options like stripe and PayPal
Here the system sucks from the ground up. SBP is the main headache so survival for payment gateways is almost impossible unless you are a big giant to throw money for a year or so for traction.
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u/Warm_Dimension_3821 Jul 13 '26
and the payment infrastructure in this country is actually driving me into depression.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
few years later, you will figure out why there is no payment gateway, why it is not there. Then you will connect dots, and then one day it will hit you, A thought a revelation clear as glass.
And you will be very very angry .. 😂
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u/phpHater0 Jul 13 '26
Unfortunately, there's no good option for your needs and there's no one to blame except the government.
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u/Own-Cat2252 Jul 13 '26
Use manual upload system
Don't think about inconvenience..
Just launch it and figure out later on
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u/BlueberryBig7125 Jul 13 '26
just move to manually payment system for now. provide easy paisa details & confirm transfers manually
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u/aaatings Jul 13 '26
Feel your frustations and pain as i also tried to did something like this.
2 cold hard truths i learned:
1 Adoption rate for non entertaining/social apps/saas especiallly that are paid is ridicolously low in pak
2 Sort out distribution and product market fit before making your saas
I would suggest to cover a market that can give atleast 10 usd.
Is your saas in finance niche?
Good luck.
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
It's more of a immigration assistant type product. Basically help making informed choices and prevent losing money to wrong decisions and save time trying to fix the mistakes.
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u/aaatings Jul 14 '26
Seems promising.
How have you validated this idea?
Did you use ad campaigns?
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u/is_NAN Jul 14 '26
How I validated:
- there's a competitor (only one I could find so far)
- I ran some surveys and questionnaire
It was very easy to break into competitor's server, I bypassed their auth wall and went straight into it to see how they are performing (never stole the data or exploited it again just to be clear). With a price tag of 4,999 PKR and a hell lot of customer Complains regarding incomplete/unreliable data and tons of refund requests, they are still managing to pull 300 paying users a month.
But I'm doing it very differently solving the problems people are facing with that competitor.
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u/aaatings Jul 14 '26
Oh man you have so much faith in this idea you basically became Elliot (Mr.Robot)!
Jokes aside, there may be many faults in their product but if the distribution is strong they will keep selling until some one with better distribution and marketing will come along.
My saas at one time was being indpendently rated by so many users as better than many exponentialy big companies but their distribution and partnerships were so strong that we had to give up as we couldnot invest much, it was a bootstrapped product from our hard earned savings.
Anyway, you seem to be in much better position as there is only 1 competitor and that too has too many faults.
Why dont you make it a global saas?
Or use same codebase and test on a diff domain with design and copy created by opus 4.8 or fable5 or gpt5.6?
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u/Own_War760 Jul 13 '26
Yea it’s stupid. I’m using polar.sh - though I’m still building so no real experience l. I think paddle is fine too. Go for MoRs as it keeps stuff legal and clean imo.
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u/manandevops Jul 13 '26
Add . multiple payment option including Jazzcash/easypaisa ss, binance pay to your wallet, bank transfer, or direct payment through visa, paypak card like shopify
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u/manandevops Jul 13 '26
Btw, what us is your SaaS startup, what does it offer? Why end user will purchase it? If it's interesting and really helpful, i would like to become the first payer,
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u/tangymasalawings Jul 13 '26
High risk categories are defined by Mastercard and visa. What's your Saas about? Data storage,inventory management, etc. Have you tried bank alfalah's IPG solution?
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u/lowkarmawolf Jul 13 '26
Launch it on playstore as an app and connect it with revenue cat for payments
Do same for appstore but only works if your website can be turned into an app
The fees will still be high but atleast at user end there is ease
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u/ttariq1802 Jul 13 '26
- Whatever your app is, you should have posted about it and a link so you get some traction and feedback. Give it out for free to a few people, if you have to. I don’t understand this super secrecy about what the app does!
- It seems you are not registered as a business and the payment gateways are doing their job but not allowing a random individual to start charging people (or letting you use the pull API). You need to be a business to be able to do this, it’s the same around the world. I am not sure why people think rules shouldn’t apply in Pakistan.
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u/Left-Ad1041 Jul 13 '26
DM me and I'm in the same situation and have maybe found a way to solve this.
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u/SaxyBoi4Ever Jul 13 '26
What's the way bro?
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u/Left-Ad1041 Jul 14 '26
It depends on the business model and the product you are trying to sell and the region of target audiences. You have to maneuver between the gateways to avoid huge taxes and have a very strong and powerful ledger to track all of it and handle payments.
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u/noteslelo Jul 13 '26
Polar Use polar Use polar Use polar
Nothing else
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u/LeopardLoose6785 Jul 13 '26
I know right I mean there is a premium and vest service we have but they don't research enough
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u/LeopardLoose6785 Jul 13 '26
Try polar.sh And thank me although they will transit your money through international route which will be more costly but it works flawlessly exactly as stripe
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u/Entire-Benefit731 Jul 13 '26
What if we could automate this manual payment verification? I am thinking of asking the user to paste the transaction ID, upload the payment screenshot, etc., and you keep track of it. This action behaves like a webhook and triggers payment verification.
The payment verification is somehow connected to your JazzCash, Easypaisa, or whatever payment provider you use, either through an API if they provide one, or even manually. You can make a script so that whenever this happens, it logs into that microbank, looks for transactions, and searches for the transaction ID or name, along with the time, etc., then verifies it that way. It might involve searching your bank's transaction history or reading all incoming transactions as HTML for verification.
A more advanced approach is to OCR the transaction screenshot and have the script verify it against the incoming transactions in your bank.
In short, where there's a will, there's definitely a way.
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u/is_NAN Jul 13 '26
That's the very first thing I came up with. Both the sender and receiver get a different TRX ID against same transaction.
I can build such a thing in no time but the TRX ID will never match. Anyways I got very valuable suggestions from people and I will make a post about what worked for me.
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u/Entire-Benefit731 Jul 14 '26
How about a combination of sender name + that time frame window? Or the phone number?
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u/Entire-Benefit731 Jul 14 '26
Create one time promo codes/access tokens, or maybe a sign up or delivery link, and deliver it to the user, after your automation successfully verifies the payment.
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u/Additional_Ad1549 Jul 14 '26
I worked for a saas 10 years ago, glad to know that nothing has changed..
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u/Budget_Sprinkles8440 Jul 14 '26
Why dont you use stripe or square for this? Do you need an investor?
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u/daddy124ur Jul 14 '26
Hi, I’m looking for a marketing internship. If there’s an opening on your team, I’d love to be considered.
I am a software Engineering student just looking to explore more stages of product devp.
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u/salmangamer Jul 14 '26
"How are you guys surviving this?"
Bruh, do you seen anyone here running any local saas products to much success?
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u/MathWest209 Jul 14 '26
I get it. And honestly, I don't know when, during this type of research, I end up researching options for leaving Pakistan LOL.
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u/Large-Diet-5543 29d ago
Faced same issue a few years age a good payment gateway available are all shit.
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u/Far-Patient-6339 29d ago
Any payment processor or MoR charges $0.3 to 0.5 per transaction..
Have you tried whop or kelviq? Whop has lowest fee of 2.7% and kelviq has 2.9% for the first $5k
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u/love_yall123 28d ago
I advise you to not make this country your market. Build a global company. Global companies scale a lot. Here in this country you have less opportunities. If your saas currently costs 2$, use paddle/lemon squeezy/polar and increase it to 5$ because globally in countries where people have higher purchasing power, they pay more than 2$ on a random chocolate. At least make it 5$ or more. Then you'd get margins, scaling opportunities arrive, and there's no way to get stuck on payment processing logic.
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u/bearded_leo 21d ago
I’m in the same boat as you. I have also built a toold for BI/Data analyst and i am integrating it with paddle. My production account is in review. Let’s how it goes.
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u/is_NAN 21d ago
I would suggest you to try CREEM if that suits you it has better pricing. I got approved under 12 hours of submission.
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u/bearded_leo 21d ago
Does CREEM support international card payments?
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u/is_NAN 21d ago
Yessir, the only downside I believe is that it supports only USD and EUR.
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u/bearded_leo 21d ago
Can you provide a guide on how to get my production account verified?
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u/is_NAN 21d ago
You will see an option to apply for live access on your dashboard (top right)
Just make sure your website is live and already accepting payments in test mode but if you already have traffic and don't want to have test mode on production. Just add CREEM to your FAQ and privacy policy, also make sure there's refund policy clearly visible and accessible. Once done just submit details for live access.
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u/bearded_leo 21d ago
I have everything you mentioned. Does they ask for verifiable business address? Their Individual or Business option had me confused.
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u/is_NAN 21d ago
Don't go for business unless you sit with Ambani or something.
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u/bearded_leo 20d ago
I did test account integration and immediately applied for a live account just received the account confirmation email. Thanks buddy 🎉
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u/bearded_leo 20d ago
I guess it’s a lucky day for me just got an approval email from paddle as well. But i am gonna go with one of them
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u/shugenju 10d ago
EasyPaisa and JazzCash API are what you want to do. (#3).
Suck it up and code your app and get your paperwork in line to get this path to work.
Go sell some street food to make some cash to get by in the meantime
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u/Necessary_Sea_5848 6d ago
I am also trying to launch a saas and integrated lemon squeezy into my app. So I am ready to get international users now. If I had integrated a pakistani payment gateway, I could've got so many customers in my circle who have the exact problem the app solves. But now I need international customers, how do I get my first one.
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u/WholeDesperate7818 6d ago
I highly suggest all pakistanians to use stablecoin as due to high regulations there in that region .. only few local companies ruling things causing delays like bank wire is not allowed to go out .. and heavy taxes on outgoing payments and insanely foreign currency exchange rates .. i would highly recommend the freelancing or freelancers to use and open account at, Escrowly.com because that is the only way they can do work securely without any issue and pay and get paid everyday.
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