PayFast
South African payment gateway providing REST APIs for online payment processing, subscription billing, tokenized recurring card payments, onsite checkout, QR code payments, instant EFT bank transfers, and merchant refunds. Trusted by 80,000+ South African businesses and certified PCI-DSS Level 1.
Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.
API Evangelist profiles PayFast the way a machine reads it — 30 machine-readable artifacts across 13 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 — PayFast scores 50.2/100 (developing), 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.
How we profile PayFast
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for PayFast. 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 13
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.
PayFast Subscriptions API
REST API for managing recurring billing subscriptions, including fetching subscription details, pausing, unpausing, cancelling, updating subscription parameters, and processing ...
PayFast Tokenization API
REST API for managing tokenized recurring card payment agreements, allowing merchants to charge customers at future dates and amounts without storing card details directly. Supp...
PayFast Transaction History API
REST API for querying merchant transaction history with support for date range queries, daily summaries, weekly aggregations, and monthly aggregations, enabling merchants to rec...
PayFast Credit Card Transactions API
REST API for querying individual credit card transaction details by transaction ID, giving merchants programmatic access to card payment records.
PayFast Refunds API
REST API for merchants to initiate and track refunds on completed transactions, specifying refund amount, reason, and account type for disbursement back to the customer.
PayFast Credit Card Transactions API
Query individual credit card transaction details
PayFast Notifications API
Validate ITN (Instant Transaction Notification) webhooks
PayFast Onsite Checkout API
Generate payment identifiers for embedded (onsite) checkout flows
PayFast Payment Form API
Standard redirect-based payment form integration
PayFast Refunds API
Initiate and track refunds on completed transactions
PayFast Subscriptions API
Manage recurring billing subscription agreements
PayFast Tokenization API
Manage tokenized card payment agreements (adhoc charges)
PayFast Transaction History API
Query merchant transaction history with date range and aggregations
Scroll within the panel for all 13 ·
Pricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
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.
Payfast Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 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.
Payfast Finops
FINOPSSemantic 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.
Payfast Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 1
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.
PayFast API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 3
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.
PayFast Payment Form Request
JSON SCHEMAPayFast Refund Request
JSON SCHEMAPayFast Subscription Update Request
JSON SCHEMAExamples 6
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.
Adhoc Charge
EXAMPLECreate Refund
EXAMPLEFetch Subscription
EXAMPLEInitiate Payment
EXAMPLETransaction History Range
EXAMPLESecurity 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.
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.
Resources
Every other property we hold for PayFast — 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 1
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 1
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Build 1
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 3
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 3
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 3
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 2
The organization behind the API
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/payfast · machine-readable index on apis.io