How Layby Africa makes money — led by marketplace margin and hosted-fulfilment (live, cash today), then the transaction rail, SaaS licence, embedded credit data, and marketplace placement. Each stream is tagged with its current stage, from Live (already generating) to Future (12–18 months out, requires partnership or licence).
Our design-partner merchants — A&H, Sofa & Couch Centre, Groceries and Beds — run the platform free for now, in exchange for being reference customers. Real GMV, real customer behaviour — and zero direct platform revenue yet (Tiers 1–4 are all B / N / F).
What's already generating cash: Tier 5 stream #12 — wholesale agreements with manufacturers. KDV beds, sold at retail on layby against a wholesale price, earn a ~10–17% retail-wholesale margin on beds.zimlayby.com. This is what bootstraps us right now — and as more merchants run hosted fulfilment, it becomes a platform clip (stream #12b).
The trade: we earn the engineering signal of running production merchants, the partnership template (KDV is the first of many manufacturer agreements, Restapedic next), and the case-study credibility a cold merchant conversation can't have. First paying merchant target: Q4 2026.
The moment that contract signs, Tier 1 stream #1 goes from B to L alongside #12 — and the rest of Tier 1 + Tier 4 stream #9 follow inside the same year.
Predictable MRR per shop. The wedge — funds the company, makes the contract sticky, and earns the right to access Tier 2/3 economics on top.
Monthly per-shop fee. Tiered: Starter $29/mo (50 active laybys, 1 staff seat) · Pro $79/mo (unlimited, 5 seats, branded PDFs, quotations) · Scale $199/mo (multi-location, API access, white-label). Predictable MRR. Sticky once integrated.
1.5–3% of layby GMV, capped per ticket. Standard on every plan alongside the subscription — the two together are the core pricing. Aligns the platform with merchant growth: bigger shops pay more.
We're already the WhatsApp Business BSP via Meta Cloud API. Mark up message cost ~30%; bundle in plan or meter as overage. Merchants need messaging anyway — they don't price-shop on per-message.
Replace the manual "WhatsApp the screenshot" loop with direct rail integration. Take a clean cut on every dollar that moves. This is where infrastructure scales beyond labour-saving SaaS.
In progress now. Integrating a licensed payment gateway (mobile money: EcoCash, Innbucks, FBC, CABS) so customer payments auto-reconcile to laybys without staff intervention. Take 0.5% on the rail. Solves the #1 staff pain — POP matching — so merchants pay gladly.
Hold customer instalments and release to the merchant on fulfilment — buyer protection built in. The hold-and-pay-on-fulfilment model is near-term via a licensed partner's escrow — the partner carries custody, so no own licence is needed to start. Earning 4–5% APY on the float compounds later, once we custody directly.
After 12 months of layby completion data per customer, we own what no bank has — ground-truth repayment behaviour on small-ticket items by unbanked Africans. This is the venture-scale outcome.
Sell completion-behaviour data to banks (ZB, FBC, CABS) as a credit-decisioning product. Or partner to issue formal credit to qualified layby graduates. The same playbook Klarna ran from BNPL → bank.
Sell merchants a "we cover defaults above X%" insurance, priced from our completion-rate data. Once we know average default is, say, 7%, we offer 5%-guaranteed for a fee.
Aggregated, anonymised data on what's selling and to whom across merchants — sold to FMCG / appliance brands. Defy or Hisense pays to know which subcategories layby fastest in Harare vs Bulawayo.
Once 5+ merchants are live and customers move freely between them, the platform itself becomes an audience — and audiences can be monetised independently of the SaaS.
Brands pay to feature on the apply page or shop catalogue — Hisense banner during a "Smart TV" browse, Defy banner during "Fridges", etc. CPM budgets exist; there's no platform to spend them on in Zim retail.
Large chains (TV Sales & Home, Game) licence a private deployment of the platform. $2K–$10K/month flat. Justified because it's still 1/10th the cost of a custom build, and they get a feature roadmap they don't have to fund.
Not a revenue stream to the platform — a CAC lever. Merchants (starting with A&H) get paid for referring other shops. The most credible salesperson for a layby platform is a shop already running one profitably.
Manufacturers host their catalogue on a merchant's storefront. Merchant sells at brand retail, customer pays the merchant directly over layby, merchant ships at completion and settles the wholesale price back to the manufacturer. The merchant pockets the retail-wholesale margin on a customer the brand couldn't otherwise reach. Live with KDV on beds.zimlayby.com — more wholesale agreements in progress (Restapedic next).
Customer pays retail over the layby. Merchant holds every cent from day one (no float financing). At completion, merchant ships and settles wholesale back to the manufacturer. The merchant keeps the spread — same net result as a wholesale-cash sale, on a customer who otherwise couldn't have bought at all. This is the cash that bootstraps the company today.
Stream #12 today is merchant-level revenue — A&H pockets the margin, not the platform. Once 5+ merchants run hosted brand partnerships, Layby Africa takes a clip on the margin volume (0.5–1% of the spread, or a tier upgrade fee). The platform earned the right to this by unlocking the model.
Hosted fulfilment turns a single-tenant catalogue into a multi-brand marketplace without the platform taking inventory risk. The manufacturer ships their own stock — KDV ships their own beds. The merchant carries no stock. The platform carries no cash-flow risk. Every party owns what they're best at — and the customer pays one familiar shop, one familiar rail, in one familiar flow.
Before pan-African expansion. Before the credit-data layer. Just the SaaS subscription and the rail take, across 2% of SADC's SMB retailers.
Pitch deck, traction data, and unit economics on request. We're raising our BTF pre-seed round.