Why I built Voltax: Unifying the African Payment Stack

If you’ve ever built a checkout flow in Ghana or Nigeria, you know the drill. You integrate Paystack, and it works great. Then a client asks for a specific payment flow that only Flutterwave supports, or you need to expand to East Africa, or you simply want to switch to a new provider that offers better fees.

Suddenly, your clean codebase is littered with if (provider === 'flutterwave') checks. You’re dealing with different response shapes, inconsistent error codes, and three different ways to say "transaction successful."

I got tired of solving this problem from scratch for every project, so I built Voltax.

I built Voltax to be the "universal adapter" I always wished I had. It’s an open-source, strictly typed SDK that abstracts the chaos of African payment gateways behind a single, unified interface.

Instead of wrestling with documentation for three different providers, you just initialize Voltax, pass your config, and the SDK handles the normalization.

This initial version is built using TypeScript for NodeJS and is live on NPM. I, however, have plans to release versions in Go and Python, etc. You can also submit a pull-request for whatever language or payment gateway you have in mind.

This is my attempt to build the infrastructure I want to see in our ecosystem, and hopefully you can contribute too, and let's make it work.

Check it out:

• NPM Package
• Documentation
• Github