What's included today

Serving articles is cheap — they're cached text from our database. AI chat is different: each query runs a large language model that searches across all monitored sources, retrieves relevant articles, reasons about them, and generates a cited answer. This costs real compute per message. We limit AI queries by tier to keep the service sustainable. Everything else — briefings, signals, stories, the graph — runs on pre-computed data and is free for everyone.

Each message you send to the AI assistant counts as one query. The AI performs a vector search across thousands of articles, retrieves the most relevant ones, and synthesizes an answer with source citations. Follow-up questions in the same conversation each count as separate queries. Your daily limit resets at midnight East Africa Time.

Reading news should be free. Articles are collected and cached — serving them costs fractions of a cent. We'd rather you read everything and use AI chat when you need deeper answers than gate basic news access.

We're currently in beta with the free tier. Paid plans (Plus, Pro, and Team) will launch once we've validated the product with our first 100 users. Join the waitlist and we'll notify you as soon as they're available. Early waitlist members may get a discount.

When paid plans launch, we'll accept M-Pesa, credit/debit cards, and bank transfers via Paystack. All prices are in KES. You'll be able to cancel anytime from your account settings.

Guests can browse intelligence pages (briefings, signals, stories, graph). An account unlocks AI chat, saved searches, bookmarks, annotations, personalized feeds, and analytics. Your account also works across web and Telegram.

For most casual users, yes. Think of it like asking 3 questions to a research assistant each day. You still get unlimited access to pre-computed intelligence (briefings, signals, story clusters, entity graph) which answers most questions without AI chat. If you need to dig deeper regularly, Plus will give you 15 queries/day for less than a cup of coffee.

General AI assistants have no real-time access to Kenyan news. When you ask them about a story, they may hallucinate or give outdated answers. Arifa Chat searches monitored Kenyan and East African news sources, retrieves the actual articles, and synthesizes an answer with citations. Think of it as asking a research assistant who has read every article from Nation, Standard, Business Daily, and 19 other outlets — today.

A Smart Feed is a custom AI-curated news feed for a specific topic you care about. Define what you're interested in (e.g., "Fintech Kenya" or "Climate policy + East Africa") and Arifa continuously filters all monitored sources to show you only matching articles. Like a Google Alert, but visual, real-time, and integrated into your feed.

Yes! On the Free plan, your phone's built-in voice reads articles aloud (always free on the Android app). On Plus and above, Arifa generates premium AI-narrated audio — a natural-sounding voice reads the article for you like a podcast. Plus gets 5 narrations/day, Pro gets 20, Team gets unlimited. All plans also include audio briefings — a spoken summary of today's top intelligence.

The analytics dashboard tracks how media tone around topics shifts over time. With 3 days (Free), you see yesterday's shifts. With 90 days (Plus), you can see how coverage of, say, "NHIF transition" changed mood over 3 months — useful for understanding narrative arcs. With 1 year (Pro), you get full long-term trend analysis for reports.

At KES 349, Plus costs less than one coffee per week. You get 15 AI research queries daily (that's asking a research assistant 15 questions about Kenyan news), 5 premium audio narrations (listen to articles during your commute), 3 custom smart feeds, and 90 days of analytics history. If you're a professional who reads news daily and values understanding over skimming headlines — it pays for itself in time saved.

National Signals are AI-detected trends across Kenyan media — things like rising political tension, currency pressure, or sector growth. Each signal has a strength score (0–100), a trend direction (rising/falling), and an escalation probability. They're generated by analyzing patterns across thousands of articles, not by human editors.