About cheki.et

How a check works

Ethiopian banks and wallets publish each receipt at a public address on their own servers. cheki works out which bank a receipt belongs to, fetches that receipt from the bank, and shows the sender, receiver, amount and date it returns, with a link to the bank's own page so you can open it yourself. 9 banks and wallets are live; the bank list says which, and endpoint status says which bank pages answer today.

A green result means one thing only: the bank confirmed the receipt. A QR code, a screenshot or pasted receipt text is never enough on its own, because anyone can make one. When the bank cannot be reached (Telebirr and M-Pesa only answer Ethiopian networks), cheki says so and gives you the bank's link instead of a guess.

Why I built it

Every day in Ethiopia, shops hand over goods because a customer showed them a screenshot that says "Transfer successful." Some of those screenshots are fake, and a small shop can lose a week's profit to one of them.

The fix already exists. Each bank and wallet publishes the receipt at a public address on its own servers. Checking a payment just means asking the bank's page what it says. Yet I kept seeing that answer sold back to businesses through monthly plans, API keys and per-check quotas.

I don't think a shop owner should have to pay to read a page their own bank already made public. So cheki is free for everyone, with no account and no key. It's open source, so any developer can build it into a checkout, a Telegram bot or a point-of-sale app, or run it on their own server.

If cheki saves one shop from one fake receipt, it's done its job.

Free and open source

cheki is MIT licensed. The web app, the API, the parsers for every bank and the SDKs for TypeScript, Python, Go, PHP and Dart are all in one public repository: github.com/1RB/cheki. Anyone can read how a receipt is checked, run it on their own server, or send a fix.

The hosted API at cheki.et has per-IP rate limits so one client cannot crowd out everyone else; the docs list them, and self-hosting removes them.

Who maintains it

I'm Ray (@1RB on GitHub). I build and maintain cheki, with fixes and new banks from contributors. It is an independent project: it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or paid by any Ethiopian bank, wallet or payment company.

Questions, bug reports and new banks reach me through the contact page. What cheki does with the data you check is on the privacy page.