Safaricom’s M-Pesa Daraja 3.0 sandbox issues spur community-built local alternative

Safaricom unveiled Daraja 3.0 in November 2025, the latest iteration of its M-Pesa API platform. The launch was accompanied by a polished marketing campaign,..
✨ Key Highlights
Despite Safaricom's launch of M-Pesa Daraja 3.0 in November 2025, developers faced significant issues with its unstable sandbox environment, leading to the creation of a community-built, open-source alternative.
- A developer, OmentaElvis, released Pesa Playground in December 2025 to address the shortcomings of the official Daraja 3.0 sandbox.
- Pesa Playground offers a local-first architecture, a mini-economy simulator, and capabilities for edge case testing, running offline on a user's machine.
- The project, built with Rust and Tauri, quickly evolved, reaching version 1.0.0 in December 2025 and receiving multiple updates by January 2026.
- This alternative provides developers with a reliable way to test M-Pesa integrations, avoiding frustrations associated with the official sandbox's "happy path" problem and connectivity issues.
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