We built the top-up app we wanted to use

SA Data Sub is a product of SA Data Sub Global Resources — a small Nigerian team building payment tools that are quick, honest about their charges, and boring in the way financial software should be.

The problem

Buying airtime, data or electricity in Nigeria means re-entering card details for a ₦500 purchase, watching a payment hang on a weak signal, and having no idea whether it went through. Half the apps that fix this bolt on wallets, coins and feeds you never asked for.

What we did about it

One Naira wallet, funded through a certified checkout, spent on five things people actually buy every week. The balance lives on our servers against a double-entry ledger, orders carry unique references so a retry can never double-charge, and every purchase ends in a receipt.

How we work

Four rules we don’t break

The price you see is the price you pay

Charges are shown before you confirm, in Naira, on the same screen as the amount. No surprises after the fact.

Your data is not the product

We collect what a payment needs and nothing else. We do not sell personal data, and there is no advertising network inside the app.

Every Naira is accounted for

Funding, purchases, refunds and rewards are recorded as ledger entries. A balance is something we can explain line by line, not a number in a cache.

Scope discipline

No crypto, no trading, no lending, no social layer. Features earn their place by making a top-up faster or safer, or they stay out.

Under the hood

What the app is made of

We are open about the stack, because the choices are the reason the app behaves the way it does.

The app

One Flutter codebase, Android and iOS

A single native-compiled codebase means the same screens, the same validation and the same fixes land on both platforms at once — no platform lagging months behind.

The wallet

Server-held balance on a double-entry ledger

Nothing spendable is decided on the phone. Every movement is a ledger entry on our servers, which is what lets you sign in on a new device and find your balance and history intact.

Payments

Paystack hosted checkout

Funding runs inside Paystack’s PCI‑DSS certified checkout, so every channel they support — card, bank transfer, USSD, bank, device wallets — works, and no card data ever reaches us. Credits are applied only after we verify the transaction directly and match it to a signed webhook.

Delivery

Idempotent orders with automatic re-query

Each purchase carries a unique request id, so a retry on a flaky connection cannot charge or deliver twice. When a provider answers ambiguously, we re-check the order until the outcome is certain — and reverse it to your wallet if it failed.

Security

Device lock, transaction PIN, secure storage

You can put the app behind your fingerprint or face and require a PIN for each purchase. Session credentials sit in the platform’s own secure storage — the Android Keystore and the iOS Keychain — not in ordinary app files.

The team

Who builds SA Data Sub

A small team, which is why you get a person rather than a ticket number when you write to us.

Founder & CEO

Saminu Abdulhamid

Direction, partnerships and operations

Questions, partnerships, or a stuck transaction?

We answer our own email. Send us the details — including a transaction reference if you have one — and a person will look at it.