Buy Now, Pay Later Company Unveils Buy Now, Pay Later Plan For Buy Now, Pay Later Payments

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Laterly, the fintech app that lets shoppers split a $38 candle into four interest-free installments, announced Tuesday that customers can now split those four installments into four more installments. The company is calling it "Laterly Squared." Consumer advocates are calling it "the thing we specifically warned you about in 2023."

"We kept hearing from users that four payments on a candle was still, somehow, too much money to have at one time," said Dillon Marsh, Laterly's chief product officer, speaking at a livestream event in front of a small but enthusiastic crowd of eleven people. "So we built a solution. Now you can pay $2.50 a week to pay $9.50 a month to pay $38 once. It's financial technology at its most elegant."

Early adopter Renee Kowalski, 34, said she signed up within minutes of the announcement to refinance a Laterly plan she'd taken out to refinance an earlier Laterly plan for a pair of sandals. "I don't really know what I owe anymore, or to whom," Kowalski said, "but the app has a little confetti animation every time I open it, so I assume things are going well."

A study released the same day by the Verity Lending Institute, a research group Laterly also funds, found that the average user now holds 4.2 simultaneous payment plans for a single pair of sandals purchased in the spring of 2024. Sixty-one percent of users could not say, when asked directly, whether they were a customer of Laterly or merely a customer of a plan designed to pay off Laterly. The company called the findings "proof the model is working."

Rival firms, which had considered the four-installment candle market fully saturated, say they're scrambling to catch up. A spokesperson for competitor Sooner Pay confirmed the company is fast-tracking its own recursive product, tentatively named "Sooner, But Also Later," which will let customers pay off a plan using a new, smaller plan, which can itself be paid off using an even smaller plan, continuing "for as long as the candle holds sentimental value."

Federal regulators say they're monitoring the situation but have not identified a law that specifically prohibits a company from lending a customer the money to repay the company. Marsh said Laterly welcomes the scrutiny. "Transparency matters to us," he said, before noting that the company's terms of service run 47 pages and can now be read in four installments.

At press time, a Laterly spokesperson confirmed the company is developing a loyalty program that rewards customers with a fifth payment plan, free of charge, for anyone who successfully completes the other four.