A substantial cost to operators with a large pre-pay customer base is the commissions they pay to retail outlets for voucher based topups.

For consumers voucher topups are inconvenent.

#topup is designed to give better service to the customer whilst reducing costs for the mobile operator.

#topup works in exactly the same way as #cash - except the payment to the receiver arrives in the form of call credit and the sender begins their text #topup.

A customer can topup their own phone by simply sending the #topup mesage to themselves.