When describing lomi. in casual conversations, I've often defaulted to shorthand: "We're building Paystack, but open source" or "We're CinetPay but open source" when talking to merchants in Côte d'Ivoire.
But this simplification does us a disservice. If being an "open-source alternative" were the only value proposition, I would have never started working on this project. What I've learned building lomi.is that open source solutions can't succeed merely by imitating established products with an MIT license attached. As powerful as open source is, it's insufficient on its own.
This is especially true for commercial open source products like ours that compete with popular solutions in the fintech industry that have been in the game for years. CinetPay, for instance, the Ivorian industry leader, started building their solution in 2014! It might look scary to think about entering a market like this, right? But my intention has never been to compete with legacy players.
What we're doing at lomi. is building the enterprise-grade e-commerce and payment infrastructure designed to power West Africa's digital economy by 2030.
Profit enables impact: the commercial open source reality
For some, this might be a tough pill to swallow. But a for-profit business exists for profit. Profit is what allows software companies like Wave and Sanity to hire talent, scale operations, and continually improve their technology stack.
It's what funds ongoing development and ensures the team behind the product can provide reliable service to users who depend on their platform.
There's nothing contradictory at all about building free, open-source software while operating a profitable business. In fact, this sustainable model has enabled companies like Expo (mobile app development platform) and Supabase to build robust products with thriving communities.
Even in the financial technology sector, companies like Parafin have demonstrated how open-source models can create significant value while maintaining top-notch reliability and security.
The distinction between adoption and revenue generation is crucial. If an open-source project achieves widespread adoption but can't generate revenue, it will eventually wither. Some might hope the community will sustain it, but evidence suggests this rarely happens for complex commercial products.
So how does open source win?
Open source becomes particularly powerful when it addresses a transparency problem, i.e. when being closed source creates distrust between client and vendor. This is especially relevant for us since we handle checkouts and sensitive customer information.
For businesses in West Africa, where trust in financial systems is still developing, our open-source approach provides several distinct advantages:
No vendor lock-in: Unlike proprietary payment processors, merchants can modify our codebase or even self-host if their requirements demand it. While implementing a complete payment stack like ours might involve significant work and time, this flexibility makes sense for some specific use cases.
Verifiable security: Our merchants can inspect our code to ensure that we handle their payments and merchant data with the appropriate security measures.
Compliance: Operating across the UEMOA (West African Economic and Monetary Union) requires adherence to complex regulatory frameworks. Our open-source model allows regulators and partners to verify our compliance mechanisms.
Extensibility: One of the most compelling benefits of open source is the community that forms around the product. Even though lomi. is still a small startup, we're striving to build a community based on shared values to enable collaborative development particularly for region-specific payment integrations that global providers often overlook.
While our core platform is maintained by our team, we've designed lomi. to welcome:
Contributions to integrate with payment service providers across the continent that we do not currently handle.
Connections to regional banking systems and localisation for francophone countries and other African regions.
Contributions to enhance security, create new features and products, and continuously improve our stack.
I sincerely believe that open source and its inherent extensibility is particularly important in Africa today, where the payment landscape across countries and regions is still extremely fragmented but also constantly evolving at fast speed and in very unpredictable ways.
Through our open SaaS, APIs, e-commerce plugins, boilerplates, developer tools, and comprehensive documentation, we are not just looking to serve merchants who want to sell their products online and through their preferred channels — we're looking to empower them to build, to customize, and to scale their applications and products to meet their unique business needs.
By fostering a collaborative ecosystem around our products, we're building a foundation for digital commerce innovation with the flexibility to adapt to the continent's diverse markets and rapidly changing financial landscape.
Building better technology through the power of community
One of the first ideas that came to me while building lomi. was to accelerate the development of our product roadmap thanks to a bounty system — something I'm still working on to make it a reality and I believe that we'll definitely be able to launch this program in the coming months.
Though my developer friends have warned me that relying purely on open-source contributions isn't ideal for planning a tech roadmap, I've seen firsthand how a passionate community creates value that money simply can't buy, something far more powerful than any Google ad campaign or recruitment interview could ever deliver.
Community enables us to achieve the highest leverage across multiple levels of software development and business building, whether it's recruiting mission-driven talent, reducing time to market, or staying ahead of the innovation curve.
By embracing open source as a whole, I've significantly accelerated development beyond what would have been possible as a closed-source platform. Since day one, our small community of merchants has provided invaluable feedback, identified edge cases specific to their local markets and needs, and contributed improvements that will ultimately benefit all merchants and strengthen our path to success.
As we progress toward our vision of becoming the foundational e-commerce and payment infrastructure for West Africa, we are committed to fast iteration to build something truly new.
Open source has never been merely a development methodology — it is a strategic advantage. In the age of AI, it enables developers to build more transparent, more extensible, and ultimately, better solutions. For Africa, it is the catalyst for creating new types of technological products and driving growth faster like never before.
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lomi. is a payment processing platform based in Côte d'Ivoire. We create and commercialise e-commerce products with built-in payment channels aggregation capabilities, facilitating digital payments and disbursements for merchants and businesses of all sizes. To learn more about what drives our product roadmap, read our blog, visit our GitHub, download our merchant mobile app, or simply create an account.
*Gratitude to open source billing platform Lago and founders, whose approach to business inspired this article.