NaiForge vs Sky.Garden
Shut down in March 2025. Kept here as the clearest lesson in platform risk Kenyan ecommerce has produced.
What you actually pay
KES 30,000-95,000 one-time
Zero. You own the code, and nobody's funding round can switch it off.
M-Pesa via Pay-to-Till by default — no gateway, no gateway fee (just Safaricom's own ~0.55%). Automated M-Pesa: KES 20,000 add-on, included in Premium, a gateway rate that depends on the provider (published: Paystack 1.5%, Flutterwave 2.9%, IntaSend 3%, Pesapal 3-3.5%).
50% deposit, balance on delivery.
No longer operating
Nothing, because there is nothing to pay. While it ran, the model was free listing against roughly 8% commission, with paid SuperSeller tiers for reduced rates.
N/A. Sellers who had balances at closure were dealing with a wound-down business, not a fee schedule.
N/A.
There is no break-even to calculate, because there is no longer a platform. Sky.Garden was Kenya's most credible home-grown marketplace: Amazon-style, M-Pesa-native, genuinely well built. It nearly closed in September 2022 when a funding round fell through, was rescued by an acquisition from fintech Lipa Later, and then went down for good in March 2025 when Lipa Later itself ran out of money. Sellers did not lose their shops to a bad decision of their own. They lost them to someone else's balance sheet, twice, with the second one final.
Feature by feature
| Feature | NaiForge | Sky.Garden |
|---|---|---|
| Operating status | Live | Shut down March 2025 |
| Pricing model | KES 30,000-95,000 one-time | Was free listing + ~8% commission |
| Commission | 0% | Was 5-8% |
| Who can switch it off | You | Its parent company's investors |
| Your domain | yourbrand.com | Was a Sky.Garden subdomain |
| Customer list | Yours, exportable | Went with the platform |
| Courier choice | Any | Was the platform's network |
- Nobody else's funding round can switch your shop off
- No commission on any sale, ever
- Your own domain and your own customer list, portable by definition
- Code you hold, hostable anywhere, by any developer
- Any courier you like, not a platform's partner network
- It was genuinely good while it ran — Kenya-built, M-Pesa-native, real discovery traffic
- Zero upfront cost, which is a real advantage for a seller with no capital
- Built-in buyers, which an owned site has to earn
- Its failure was financial, not technical — worth saying plainly
Who should choose what
Choose NaiForge if…
You want the part of your business that carries your customers and your catalogue to be yours. Marketplaces are a fine channel; they are a poor foundation, and Sky.Garden is the proof rather than the hypothetical.
Choose Sky.Garden if…
You cannot. It is gone. If you are reading this because you sold on Sky.Garden, the useful question is not which marketplace to move to but how much of your business should ever sit somewhere you do not control.
This page exists as a record, not a comparison. The lesson is not that marketplaces are bad — Sky.Garden gave a lot of Kenyan sellers their first real online sales, and its collapse was a funding failure rather than a product one. The lesson is that a channel you rent can be withdrawn on a timetable that has nothing to do with how well you are trading. Use marketplaces for discovery. Own the shop.
NaiForge vs Sky.Garden — FAQ
NaiForge vs everything else
vs Shopify
Global SaaS with polished templates — but USD-billed monthly forever.
vs Jumia Seller Center
Free to list, but Jumia takes 6-20% per sale and owns the customer.
vs WhatsApp Business
Free, familiar, and where your customers already are — but manual, unscalable, and invisible to Google.
vs Wix
Drag-and-drop templates billed in USD forever — vs a one-time KES site you own.
Ready to decide?
WhatsApp us — we'll tell you honestly if Sky.Garden is actually a better fit for you. We lose some leads that way; we keep the right ones.