Two operators with identical equipment can run completely different businesses depending on how they charge. The decision is less about preference than about the venue you are serving.
Prepaid vouchers
Customers buy a code that grants access for a fixed period. When it expires, they buy another or they do not.
What is good about it: you get paid before you deliver anything. No invoicing, no chasing, no bad debt. Nobody has an account to manage, which means nobody has a password to forget. A customer who disappears costs you nothing.
What is hard about it: revenue is unpredictable and you have to keep selling. Vouchers must be printed, distributed and reconciled. Codes go missing, get shared, or turn up months later. And you are re-earning the sale constantly.
Fits: hotels, cafés, event venues, transport hubs — anywhere your customers are transient by nature.
Monthly accounts
Customers have an account, pay on a cycle, and stay connected between payments.
What is good about it: predictable revenue. You know roughly what next month looks like, which makes buying more bandwidth a decision rather than a gamble. Customers stop thinking about the cost, which is exactly what you want.
What is hard about it: you deliver before you are paid, so you carry credit risk and you will spend time chasing. Expectations rise sharply — a monthly subscriber who loses service for an evening is far angrier than a day-pass buyer, and rightly so. You also inherit support: password resets, device changes, disputes about what they were charged.
Fits: residential estates, student accommodation, small offices — anywhere your customers stay put.
Running both
Most established operators end up doing both, because most venues have both kinds of customer. An estate has residents (monthly) and their visitors (day passes). A hotel has guests (vouchers) and long-stay corporate clients (monthly).
Two things make this work:
Keep the products genuinely distinct. If a week of vouchers costs about the same as a month’s subscription, you have taught your customers to buy vouchers. Price monthly to be clearly better value for anyone staying more than a couple of weeks.
Keep the profiles separate on the router. Different speeds, different device limits, different validity. Do not run both products off one profile and try to track the difference in your head.
The number that decides it
Work out your revenue per customer per month under each model, honestly.
Vouchers at ₦300 a day sound excellent next to ₦2,500 a month — until you notice the voucher buyer purchases eight days a month, not thirty. That is ₦2,400, slightly less than the subscription, with far more of your time spent selling.
Conversely a monthly subscriber who pays ₦2,500 and calls you twice a month may be worth less than a voucher buyer who never calls anyone.
Count the support calls. They are a real cost and they are the one operators consistently leave out.
Switching later
Moving from vouchers to subscriptions is the usual direction, and it works best gradually: offer monthly to your regulars first, keep vouchers for everyone else, and let the mix shift on its own.
Going the other way — withdrawing subscriptions and forcing everyone onto vouchers — reliably loses customers. People experience it as a price rise even when it is not.
Whichever you run, you need to know what you actually sold. MikrotikAdmin tracks batches, usage and revenue per batch, which is the raw material for this decision.