Need help with your APIs? I offer API discovery, governance & evangelism services. Explore services →
API Evangelist API Evangelist
Discovery
Learnings
Guidance
Toolbox
Alignment
API Evangelist LLC
Cellulant website screenshot

Cellulant

Cellulant is a pan-African payments platform headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, operating across 35 African countries. Its flagship product Tingg is a single API that lets businesses collect online and offline payments, disburse to mobile money wallets and bank accounts, vend airtime and data, pay bills, and engage customers by SMS — interoperably across 350+ banks, mobile network operators, and card networks. Cellulant processes more than 4.5 million transactions per day for over 2,000 enterprise merchants and powers payments for ~220 million consumers. The Tingg platform exposes three primary developer-facing surfaces: Tingg Checkout 3.0 (Express, Custom and Direct Card), Tingg Payouts (the Beep global JSON endpoint), and Tingg Engage (transactional SMS). Cellulant ships official SDKs for PHP, Python, Node.js, .NET, JavaScript, plus a WooCommerce plugin.

agent ready

Solid contracts, transparent operations, and an easy start — typically complete on four or five facets with one clear soft spot.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles Cellulant the way a machine reads it — 35 machine-readable artifacts across 6 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Cellulant scores 63.0/100 (strong), with a separate agent-readiness read of 48/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 63.0/100 · strong
Contract Quality 19.3 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 13.5 / 20
Commercial Clarity 7.9 / 20
Operational Transparency 4.8 / 13
Governance 10.4 / 12
Discoverability 8.8 / 10
Regulatory · Payments 8.1 / 15
Agent readiness — 48/100 · agent ready
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 15 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile Cellulant

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Cellulant. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 6

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Cellulant Acknowledgement API

Acknowledge successful or partial payments back to the platform.

Cellulant Authentication API

OAuth 2.0 access token issuance for Tingg API calls.

Cellulant Custom Checkout API

Host-to-host checkout flow for merchant-controlled UX.

Cellulant Engagement API

Outbound SMS notifications and OTPs.

Cellulant Express Checkout API

Create hosted checkout sessions returning short and long URLs.

Cellulant Payments API

Post payouts, queries, validations, balances, and refunds.

Postman Collections 3

A runnable collection turns the contract into something a developer can execute in seconds. We profile them because the fastest way to trust an API is to make a real call against it.

Ready-to-run Postman collections for exercising this provider's APIs.

Open Collections 3

Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Arazzo Workflows 10

Real integrations are rarely a single call. Arazzo describes the multi-step sequences — auth, then create, then confirm — so both a human and an agent can follow the choreography, not just the endpoints.

Multi-step API workflows described with the Arazzo specification.

Cellulant Charge with OTP Notification

Initiate a custom checkout, send the customer an OTP by SMS, then push the charge request.

ARAZZO

Cellulant Check Balance and Payout

Read the float balance, then disburse a payout only when the platform authenticated the balance query.

ARAZZO

Cellulant Checkout, Poll, and Acknowledge

Raise an Express Checkout, poll status until paid, then acknowledge delivery back to the platform.

ARAZZO

Cellulant Checkout with SMS Notification

Create an Express Checkout, then text the customer the short payment URL over Tingg Engage.

ARAZZO

Cellulant Custom Checkout, Charge, and Poll

Host-to-host flow — authenticate, initiate a custom checkout, push the charge prompt, then poll until the payment resolves.

ARAZZO

Cellulant Express Checkout and Poll Status

Authenticate, raise a Tingg Express Checkout, then poll the request status until the payment settles.

ARAZZO

Cellulant Get Bill and Pay

Fetch the outstanding bill for an account, then settle it with a Beep payout.

ARAZZO

Cellulant Payout, Query, and Refund

Disburse a payout, query its outcome, and reverse it with a refund when the payout did not succeed.

ARAZZO

Cellulant Post Payout and Query Status

Disburse a payout, then poll the Beep platform with queryPayment until the payout reaches a terminal state.

ARAZZO

Cellulant Validate and Post Payout

Validate the destination account, then post a mobile money or bank payout through the Beep platform.

ARAZZO

Scroll within the panel for all 10 ·

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Cellulant Rate Limits

4 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Cellulant Context

0 classes · 4 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 2

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

Cellulant API Rules

5 rules · 3 warnings

SPECTRAL

Cellulant API Rules

6 rules · 1 errors · 4 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 2

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

Tingg Express Checkout Request

17 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Tingg Payout Packet

14 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Examples 3

Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.

Example request and response payloads for these APIs.

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Cellulant Authentication

apiKey/http · 3 schemes

SECURITY

Cellulant Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Cellulant Agentic Access

8 operations · 7 acting

8 operations · 7 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for Cellulant — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Get Started 4

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Documentation 3

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Learn 1

Tutorials, courses, talks, and written guidance

Operate 2

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Company 7

The organization behind the API

Scroll within the panel for all 7 ·

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/cellulant · machine-readable index on apis.io