You finished the app. It works. You open a hosting provider, click Deploy, and the form asks for a Visa or Mastercard that can be billed in dollars. You don't have one. Neither does your co-founder. That's where the project stops.
This is not a small edge case. Across West and East Africa, a developer can have a laptop, a GitHub account, a working product and paying customers — and still be locked out of every major cloud platform by a payment form. The code was never the obstacle.
Qeda is built the other way round: you pay in your own currency, with the payment methods you already use, and no card is required at any point.
Why the card is such a wall
International hosting providers bill in dollars or euros against a card that supports cross-border transactions. Three things break there:
- Most local debit cards are domestic-only and are declined on foreign merchants
- Cards that do work often carry foreign-transaction fees, and the bank may block the first charge as suspicious
- Monthly subscriptions in a foreign currency make budgeting impossible when the exchange rate moves
The usual workarounds are worse than the problem: borrowing a friend's card abroad, buying a virtual card with its own fees, or paying a reseller a margin to deploy on your behalf. None of them scale, and none of them survive an audit when the company grows.
How you actually pay on Qeda
Qeda uses a prepaid wallet. You top it up when you want, with the amount you choose, and the platform debits it hourly for the capacity your applications use. There is no subscription, no auto-renewal, and nothing that keeps charging after you stop.
You top up with what you already have in your pocket:
- Mobile money — Wave, Orange Money, MTN Mobile Money, Moov
- Local bank cards, in your own currency
- Bank transfer, where your provider supports it
If you have ever sent money by phone, you already know how to pay for your infrastructure. There is no new account to open with a foreign provider, and no conversion to think about.
Prices in your currency, not converted at checkout
Qeda prices are set per country in the local currency — not a dollar price translated at the last second. The same base unit, 0.5 vCPU and 1 GB of RAM for a month, costs:
- 3,700 XOF in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Togo, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger
- 9,500 NGN in Nigeria
- 950 KES in Kenya
- 80 GHS in Ghana
- 95 ZAR in South Africa
Those figures are adjusted for local purchasing power. A student in Dakar and a startup in Lagos are not paying a price designed for San Francisco and then converted.
Because billing is hourly against a balance you set, the worst case is that your balance reaches zero and your services stop. Nothing is charged silently, and no invoice arrives at the end of a month you had forgotten about.
What the signup actually asks for
An email address, a password, and the country you are in. That last one matters: it fixes your currency and your price grid, so choose the country you actually operate from. It cannot be changed afterwards.
That is the whole form. No card, no billing address, no company registration number.
You can then connect a GitHub repository and deploy — Qeda detects your stack, builds the image and gives you a public HTTPS URL. Node.js, Python, Go, PHP, Ruby and anything with a Dockerfile all work the same way.
What happens when the balance runs out
Your running services stop, and your data stays where it is. Top up again and they come back. There is no overdraft, no debt collection and no credit check — which is the other half of why a card was never the right instrument for this market.
Because the wallet is prepaid, you can hand a junior developer a project with a fixed balance and know exactly what the maximum spend is. Try setting that ceiling on a card-based platform.
Keeping an eye on the balance
The dashboard shows your current balance, what you are burning per hour, and how many days of runway that buys at your present usage. Top up before it reaches zero and your services never pause.
It is the same habit as topping up airtime, applied to infrastructure — and it is the reason you will never receive a bill you did not expect.
Getting started
Create an account, pick your country, connect a repository and deploy. During the beta there is nothing to pay at all — and when billing opens, it opens in your currency, with the payment method already in your phone.