BaKhabar Kissan reports 12 million users, while its grant report shows paying customers falling

BaKhabar Kissan says it has more than 12 million users, and its own grant report records that the number of paying customers fell in the 18 months when it added 6.4 million of them. The distance between a very large audience and a small paying core is the business that Khizer Alam Khan has been building in Islamabad since 2017, and it explains almost every decision the company has made.

Khan came from a farming family and left a seven year technology career in early 2017 to start the company with his uncle, Ibrar Khan. The first team was five people working from a residential house. The idea was advice for farmers on crop health, inputs, pests and weather. By the company's account in a 2024 case study published by Karandaaz, it gave that advice free for two years, until 2020, before asking anyone to pay.

A dataset nobody trusted

The free years bought less than they should have. Management found after about two years that the information farmers had given the company was inaccurate and inconsistent, because farmers were reluctant to hand details to a firm they did not know. Between 2019 and 2020 it rebuilt the dataset, sending trained staff into the field to explain the service in person and training its call centre to record answers properly.

The second problem was weather. BKK had been passing on forecasts from third parties, and wrong forecasts cost it credibility with exactly the people it wanted to keep. Its answer was a sister company, Weatherwalay, which according to the case study spent around Rs400 million on a network of 300 weather stations. BKK says it now draws live readings from more than 600 stations, counting its own and those run by private owners, the government and donors.

Divide the figures and the scale of that bet is clear. Rs400 million over 300 stations is about Rs1.33 million a station. Zong, one of BKK's telecom partners, advertised the service in February 2024 at Rs2.5 a day, which is Rs912.50 for a subscriber who stays all year. At that price, Rs400 million equals the gross receipts from roughly 438,000 full year subscriptions. The sum is only an order of magnitude, since the operator's share of each subscription has not been published.

A grant extended it. From November 2022 to April 2024, the GSMA Innovation Fund for Climate Resilience and Adaptation, funded by the British and Swedish governments, supported BKK in deploying 155 more automated stations. The grant report says the average error in quarterly rainfall forecasts fell to 3 percent. It does not say how that error is defined, so the figure cannot be compared with another forecaster's.

Subscriptions, inputs and a loan book

When charging began, BKK set a rule that blunts its own revenue: anyone who had subscribed even once keeps receiving SMS updates after they stop renewing. The audience is therefore larger than the paying base by design. Paying customers come through Jazz and Zong, which let users pay by airtime or mobile wallet, and through the company's app, which is free at the basic level and sells premium advice by the day, month or year. Zong users reach the service by dialling *8494# or texting 8494.

The second revenue line is the farm itself. BKK opened a fulfilment arm in 2021, with agri centres that sell seed, fertiliser and crop protection, and added a shop to its app in 2022. Its website lists five physical shops. The GSMA report says subscription fees and commissions on input sales both feed revenue, that the weather and advisory service has become profitable and that the input business breaks even. The company's own figures say it has lent Rs200 million to 2,200 farmers, an average of about Rs90,900 each.

The channel mix shows where the business actually sits. The grant report counts about 6.46 million farmers supported through SMS, voice and call centre services in the grant period, against 40,162 through the app. The app reached less than 1 percent of the combined total. BKK's farmers are mostly on basic phones, and the report describes a typical user as a man of about 37 who grows wheat and earns less than Rs61,000, or $220, a month. Only 11 percent of users are women. The price is small against that income: at Rs2.5 a day a subscriber pays about Rs75 a month, or at least 0.12 percent of a Rs61,000 salary.

“Building the right team is the most difficult bit and I am happy to have found it.”

That team had grown from 33 people in 2018 to 153 in 2024, according to the same case study. The board, formalised in 2018 with members from BKK and the financial services company Neem, met twice a week in the early days and pushed the company toward profit and self sufficiency over rapid expansion. On its advice, the case study says, the chief executive stepped back from day to day operations and from hiring, which he had been doing himself.

A large audience, a small profiled core

The grant report of February 2025 puts BKK's user base at more than 12 million, with close to a third having used the service in the previous 30 days, or about 4 million people. The company knows few of them well. The Karandaaz case study describes a community of 13 million farmers of whom 820,000 had been deeply profiled, which is 6.3 percent. That profiled group is the one a lender or input seller can price.

Set the loan book against it. The 2,200 loans reported by Karandaaz equal 0.27 percent of the 820,000 profiled farmers, so credit is still a pilot in proportion to the data behind it.

The grant report credits the 6.4 million new users of the 18 grant months to a promotional campaign built around the improved weather station network, so the stations were as much a marketing asset as a data one. Over the same months the number of paid customers fell, which the report attributes partly to higher prices linked to higher operating costs, even as it counted 34,000 new monthly subscribers.

What is unproven

The revenue and subscriber charts in the Karandaaz case study are masked, so growth cannot be turned into rupees, and the operators' revenue share is unpublished. The grant report adds that smallholders struggle to afford higher tier services. No source reports how the Rs200 million of loans has performed.

The speech recognition system that the grant funded works in Urdu in three Punjab districts and has not scaled to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where the report says the number of languages and dialects is the obstacle. Pakistan has more than 77 languages.

The company's plan is to move from advice to the transaction. It chose five areas for deep profiling, Swabi, Sargodha, Jhang, Chiniot and Buner, and aims to take its combined physical and digital model to 20 districts over five years. The GSMA report says it aims to set up direct market linkages and output procurement by 2026, and to add credit and insurance to the platform. The year ends on 31 December, so whether BKK announces buyers for its farmers' crops by then is the next thing to watch.