nobytechy/manishapay-payments-kb

Noby Payments Knowledge Base — v1.0 (dataset)

An open, structured, machine-readable knowledge base of online payment gateways — how you integrate them, what they support, and the recurring developer pain points for each (and how to avoid them). Africa-inclusive: covers Zimbabwean, pan-African, South African, East-African and global gateways in one consistent schema.

Curated and maintained by Noby Tebulo as part of the ManishaPay project — the same data powers ManishaPay's gateway orchestration engine.

Status: v1.0 (2026-07). 11 gateways.

Why this exists

Payment-integration knowledge is scattered across dozens of official docs, forum threads, GitHub issues and blog posts — and almost none of it is structured or Africa-inclusive. This dataset distills it into one consistent, queryable schema, so developers (and AI assistants) can answer "how do I integrate gateway X, and what will bite me?" from a single source.

What's in it

Per gateway (gateways/<id>.json, validated against `schema.json`):

• —Identity — regions, countries, currencies, payment methods
• —Auth model + how to get sandbox credentials (instant vs KYC)
• —Initiate-payment flow — endpoint, params, what it returns, amount unit
• —Status — webhook/poll mechanics, signature verification, and a raw→canonical status map (paid | pending | failed | disputed | refunded)
• —Capabilities — redirect / poll / webhook / mobile-push / refund / recurring
• —Credentials a merchant must supply
• —Sandbox test cards / numbers
• —Pain points — the recurring problems devs hit, their cause, and the mitigation (with sources)
• —Official SDKs
• —Sources + verification flags (verified, unverified_fields, last_updated)

verification.verified means the record's documentation was cross-checked for accuracy, not that the gateway is live in ManishaPay — so a "coming soon" gateway (e.g. Yoco) can carry verified: true without any contradiction.

Gateways in v1.0

PayNow (🇿🇼) · Pesepay (🇿🇼) · Flutterwave (🌍) · Paystack (🌍) · Stripe (🌐) · PayPal (🌐) · PayFast (🇿🇦) · Yoco (🇿🇦) · Ozow (🇿🇦) · M-Pesa/Daraja (🇰🇪) · DPO Pay (🌍)

Formats (build outputs)

The dist/ outputs are already built from the canonical gateways/*.json sources:

• —gateways/*.json — canonical, one file per gateway (source of truth).
• —dist/noby-payments-v1.json — single merged array.
• —dist/noby-payments-v1.jsonl — one record per line (ML / Hugging Face friendly).
• —dist/pain-points.csv — flattened problem→mitigation rows.
• —dist/methods-matrix.csv — methods × gateways grid.
• —dist/qa.jsonl — (future) instruction / Q&A pairs derived from the KB, for RAG or fine-tuning.

The AI layer (roadmap, built ON this dataset)

v1.0 is the dataset. On top of it we can build:

1. 1.RAG assistant ("PayBot") — answers integration questions grounded in these records. Pragmatic, no training.
2. 2.Fine-tuning set — the qa.jsonl split turns records into instruction pairs for a small tuned model.

The dataset is designed so both are a straight consumption of the same files — no re-collection.

License

CC BY 4.0 — free to use with attribution to "Noby Payments Knowledge Base, Noby Tebulo".

⚠️ Disclaimer

Not official documentation and not affiliated with or endorsed by any listed provider. Gateway names/marks belong to their owners and are referenced factually. APIs change — always verify against the provider's official docs before production use. Fields not cross-checked against official docs are listed in each record's verification.unverified_fields. Contains no secrets or credentials.

Provenance

Compiled 2026-07 from each provider's official developer documentation plus the developer community (GitHub issues, StackOverflow, forums, technical blogs). Every record lists its sources.

Publishing homes (planned)

• —GitHub — canonical repo (issues/PRs for corrections).
• —Hugging Face Datasets — loadable via datasets, dataset viewer, and the natural home for the AI layer.
• —Kaggle — reach.

Maintenance

Versioned (v1.0, v1.1, …). Each record carries last_updated; corrections via PR. As a provider changes its API, its record (and ManishaPay's live behaviour) update together.