What a chama actually pays for Jamvi
The question that stalls most chamas before they even try an app is the same one: who pays, and for what. It is a fair question, and the honest answer is short enough that it should not take a search to find.
4 min readReviewed 13 September 2026
The subscription belongs to a person, not the chama
Jamvi is KES 100 a month, or KES 1,000 a year — two months free for paying once. That figure is per person, not per group, and it is never billed to the chama itself. A chama of fifty members is not one bill for fifty people; it is however many of those fifty members choose to have their own subscription.
One subscription covers everything that person does in Jamvi: their own Personal budget and every Shared group they belong to. Joining a second chama, or a third, adds nothing to what they pay.
Fourteen days free, no card, no commitment
Every new account starts with fourteen days of full access — record contributions, add expenses, invite the group, download a report — before Jamvi asks for anything. There is no card on file during that period and nothing is charged automatically when it ends.
When the trial does end, paying is one M-Pesa prompt: enter a Safaricom number in the app, a genuine Safaricom prompt reaches that phone, and a PIN entered there finishes it. Jamvi never sees or asks for the PIN itself.
A chama can run on just the treasurer's subscription
Viewing a group is always free — a member who has never paid a shilling can still open the app and see every contribution, every expense, and the running balance. Subscribing only matters for the person doing the recording.
In practice that is usually one or two people: the treasurer, and perhaps a second admin who also records. A chama does not need every member subscribed for the record to work, only the ones actually writing to it.
A lapsed subscription never deletes anything
If a subscription runs out and is not renewed, nothing in Jamvi is removed — every contribution, every member, every past month stays exactly as it was, and stays visible to the whole group.
What changes is that the lapsed person can no longer add to the record: not a new contribution, not a new expense, not a new category — in their own Personal budget as much as in any Shared group. The moment they subscribe again, recording opens back up exactly where it left off.
The short version
One person pays for their own access, not the chama for its group. Fourteen days are free, nothing is ever deleted, and the only thing a lapsed subscription switches off is adding something new.
Where Jamvi helps
See Jamvi's pricing
The full breakdown — monthly, annual, what the trial includes, and exactly what one subscription covers.