The captive portal is your salesperson on permanent duty. It opens by itself when a customer joins your WiFi, shows your bundles in your colours, takes the payment and issues the voucher. And that voucher really does expire: when the time is up, the router closes the access on its own.
They join your WiFi network. Without typing anything, your zone's page opens on their phone: that is how a captive portal works. Until they hold a valid voucher, it is the only page they can reach.
They see your name, your logo, and the bundles you have set up, with their duration, their data and their price. Prices show in the currency of the zone's country, FCFA in Cameroon, naira in Nigeria, shilling in Kenya, and the portal speaks French, English or Swahili depending on the phone's language. They choose, they pay, they are online. The whole thing takes under a minute when the operator's network is responding normally.
Every bundle carries the name you gave it: "Day pass", "Unlimited night", "Student bundle". That is the name the customer reads on the portal, and the same one printed on the paper voucher. Sooner or later customers start asking for it by name at the counter, which is the sign your price list has landed.
You choose the units for each bundle. Data is entered in MB or GB, duration in hours or days, speed always in Mbit/s. The portal then shows the bundle exactly as you built it, "2 GB · 3 days · 5 Mbit/s", and never puts raw minutes or kbit/s in front of your customer.
Five moments, from first contact with your WiFi to browsing.
The customer picks your WiFi network. The router intercepts them and shows your page. They can browse it freely: the portal sits inside the walled garden, the area allowed before payment.
They compare your bundles, 500 MB for an hour, 2 GB for the day, 10 GB for the week, and tap the one that suits them. The price stays visible all the way through, with no surprise fee added along the way.
They enter their mobile money number, MTN Mobile Money or Orange Money in Cameroon, M-Pesa in Kenya, Airtel Money in Uganda, Wave in Senegal, and get a USSD push to approve with their PIN. If they prefer a bank card, they go to a payment page hosted by our provider and come back to the portal afterwards. The methods on offer depend on the zone's country: see the list.
The portal shows a waiting screen while the operator confirms. If the payment fails or times out, the customer can start again straight away. No access opens until the money is confirmed.
The voucher is created, the session starts, and the countdown begins at that first connection. At the same moment the code binds to the phone that just used it. The customer keeps the voucher screen as proof, and you get the sale notification in the Manager app.
This is the most common way money leaks out of the trade: a customer buys "a day" on Monday and gets back online free with the same code three weeks later. With WiNet that does not happen.
You can give a bundle a validity in days, say "valid for 7 days". The countdown does not start at purchase; it starts at the customer's first connection. A voucher bought on Monday and used on Wednesday gives its full seven days from Wednesday. That is what the customer expects, and what you can explain to them without contradicting yourself.
When the time is up, the router clears things itself: the code is deleted, the running session is cut, and the small file that let the phone reconnect on its own is wiped. The customer has to buy again, exactly as agreed on the day of the sale.
Not at purchase. So you can print vouchers ahead of time and sell them over the following weeks: as long as a code has never been used, it does not go stale in the drawer.
The expiry rule is enforced by the router itself. If your operator link goes down you stop selling for the duration of the outage, but no expired code becomes usable again in the meantime.
On the first connection, the code binds to the device using it. After that the same code works nowhere else: a customer who passes it to five neighbours gives them nothing. Worth saying before the sale, though: if they switch phone mid-bundle, the code will not follow them.
Not everyone buys from their phone. The customer with no Mobile Money, the one who would rather pay in coins, the pupil turning up with their lunch change: you serve those with a code on paper. Which only works if it can be read and retyped without a mistake.
By default, one short code per voucher and one field to fill on the portal, with no separate password to type on top. It can be read out over the phone, deciphered from a crumpled scrap of paper, and typed one-handed on an entry-level keypad. If your customers are used to something else, you set the code length, the character set, and whether it is a single code or a separate username and password.
The default character set has no 0 or o, no 1, l or i: anything that blurs together in print has been taken out. No more customers coming back because "it doesn't work". You can also switch to digits only, quicker to type on a phone, if that is what your customers know.
Generate a whole sheet of vouchers in one go, up to a hundred, and print it. Enough to get through a festival weekend or the start of term without going back to the app.
The voucher carries your zone's name, the bundle name as you wrote it, what it includes, its price, and the code in large type, or the username and password if that is the format you chose. The customer knows what they bought without having to ask you.
A printed sheet that does not sell loses nothing: as long as a code has never been used, its countdown has not started. You will sell it next month.
A paper code follows the same rules as one bought on the portal: it binds to the first phone, and it expires on the date set.
Most zones sell both ways: the portal collects on its own from customers who have Mobile Money, and the printed sheet serves everyone else. Both feed the same balance and show up in the same stats.
A code that is too short can be guessed: anyone on the zone's WiFi can try them one by one. So WiNet refuses settings that are too weak, and the minimum length depends on the character set you picked, with digits only needing more characters. The app tells you at the moment you set it, along with the value to use instead. Changing the format invalidates nothing: the new setting applies to vouchers generated afterwards, and the stock you already printed keeps working.
The portal belongs to your zone, not to WiNet. You change what shows on it from the app, and the change is live straight away.
Customers recognise your business at the top of the page. It is your shopfront doing the selling, not some anonymous brand.
Buttons, selections and accents all pick up the colour you choose for the zone.
Push a promotion, the dish of the day or a local partner in the page's ad space.
A customer who gets stuck messages you straight from the portal, without hunting for your number elsewhere.
Add, remove or reprice a bundle whenever you like: the portal updates itself, no technical work needed.
Each zone has its own portal, its own colours and its own bundles, even though everything is run from a single account.
The template decides the layout. All templates are free and can be switched on zone by zone : BASIC is enough to start selling on day one, and the others change the presentation, not the features.
| Template | Access | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| BASIC | Free, on by default | Any zone starting out: a clear bundle list, logo, colour, payment. |
| BUSINESS | Free | Shops that want a more polished page and a prominent ad space. |
| CAMPUS | Free | Schools and campuses: lots of short bundles, quick to read on a small screen. |
| CAFE_HOTEL | Free | Hotels, bars and restaurants: a warm welcome screen, room for your own promotion. |
| EVENT | Free | One-off events: day bundles, artwork built for the occasion. |
The BASIC portal sells exactly the same bundles, with the same payment methods, as every other template. Switch template whenever you like: it costs nothing.
A captive portal has to load on tiny connections, usually on entry-level phones. WiNet made that a rule: no external resources. No font pulled from somewhere else, no library from another server, no heavy image forced on the page.
Everything the page needs comes from the portal itself, inside the walled garden the router allows. The page opens even when the connection wobbles, so the customer doesn't give up before paying.
That restraint protects your bandwidth too: whatever the portal doesn't load is bandwidth your paying customers get for browsing.
Create your free account in under a minute. Nothing to pay upfront, no subscription.
The WiNet app is not on Google Play yet, and the iPhone version is in the works. Message us on WhatsApp ([email protected]) and we will tell you the day it goes live. In the meantime, the app already runs in your browser.