Too expensive to buy whole. So businesses are selling it in pieces.

A shared seat instead of a car, a battery by the day instead of a generator, a phone paid for in instalments. When customers can’t pay the upfront price, businesses are finding ways around it. Here is when that works for yours.

Uber wound down its Nigerian operations with immediate effect on 2 September, after 12 years, according to Channels Television. Two days later, Shuttlers, the Lagos transport company best known for its scheduled commuter buses, announced Shuttlers Pod, with first rides from 25 September: a pre-booked car that collects three or four people travelling the same way and drops each at their exact destination. Every trip comes with a named driver, a fixed fare and a guaranteed pickup, with no surge pricing, the company says.

The timing made Pod look like a bid for Uber’s customers. The more useful way to read it is as one example of a shift that reaches well beyond transport. As big purchases take a larger bite out of household budgets, businesses are finding three ways around the upfront price: split the use, split the time, or split the purchase price.

What changed

The squeeze is measurable. Prices in August were 15.39% higher than a year earlier, and food prices 19.57% higher, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, as reported by Channels Television. The national minimum wage has been ₦70,000 a month since 2024. In June, the president’s chief of staff said it “must be honestly reassessed against today’s realities”, Pulse reported, but no new figure has been set.

Shuttlers’ chief executive, Damilola Olokesusi, put the logic plainly at the Pod launch: “Nigeria’s cost of living is rising faster than incomes.” On one route, a Pod seat would cost ₦4,000 to ₦4,500, against ₦10,000 to ₦15,000 for a comparable ride-hail trip, she told TechCabal. At the lower ride-hail figure, a working week of commuting, ten trips, would cost ₦100,000, more than a month’s minimum wage.

Shuttlers attacks that problem by splitting the use. Pod puts one rider in a car with others travelling the same way, turning the cost of a private journey into several seats that each pay their share.

bPOWERd splits the time. The start-up, developed by the oil company bp, opened seven battery rental points at Mobil filling stations in Lagos in May. Instead of buying and fuelling a small generator, a household or shop rents a solar-charged battery by the day: from ₦1,500 for a 300 watt-hour unit and ₦3,000 for a 1,000 watt-hour unit, after a ₦15,000 refundable deposit. Customers bring the battery back to the same store, its website says, and can swap it for a charged one. The same battery then earns again tomorrow from someone else. The company says it completed 125,000 rentals in its first 12 months in South Africa before bringing the model to Nigeria.

In Ghana, M-KOPA splits the purchase price. Its customers don’t rent the phone; they buy it in small instalments rather than paying upfront. The company says it has extended more than GHS 1.2 billion in credit to over 550,000 customers since 2021, and that 36% of customers surveyed said their M-KOPA phone was their first. Its plans bundle data, device protection and health insurance with the phone. Citing GSMA data, M-KOPA says an entry-level smartphone can cost up to 95% of a low-income earner’s monthly wages in sub-Saharan Africa.

Who pays

The upfront cost has not disappeared. It has moved. The customer pays less today, but the capital still has to come from somewhere. Depending on the model, the business, an asset owner or a lender funds the gap and earns the money back over repeated trips, rentals or instalments.

Each route carries its own risk. A shared asset depends on filling it: a four-seat car carrying three paying passengers has one seat earning nothing. A rented asset earns nothing on the days it sits on a shelf. A financed asset depends on customers continuing to pay once the phone is in their hands. And wherever the business keeps ownership, it also pays to maintain, move, charge, repair and replace the asset, with its capital tied up until the purchase price comes back.

The utilisation risk is not theoretical. Shuttlers does not plan to own Pod cars. Like its buses, they will come from fleet operators, which Shuttlers pays a fixed amount per trip whether or not the seats sell, TechCabal reported. On a 30-seat bus, one empty seat is about 3% of the trip; on a four-seat Pod it is 25%. The company has been here before. In its first pilot in 2015 it picked riders up from their doorsteps, then switched to bus stops because “it was difficult for us to coordinate without technology”, Olokesusi said, and the model was not profitable. “You have to price each seat low enough to compete with Bolt and other alternatives, but high enough for the operator and platform to make money,” Laolu Onifade, former chief executive of the defunct carpooling start-up Hytch, told TechCabal.

Pod’s answer is to make demand predictable: riders book ahead, a shared car runs only with at least three of them, and each must commit to at least two trips a week. bPOWERd’s deposit and M-KOPA’s continuing repayment relationship do the same job in their models. Each business has made the customer’s purchase easier by taking on more of the financing, utilisation, collection or asset risk itself.

What to do

For a business selling something expensive to customers under pressure, the first question is whether the upfront price itself is what stops the sale. If it is, the three routes are open: split the use among several customers, split the time so one asset is rented again and again, or split the purchase price so the customer pays towards ownership over time.

Which one works depends on what happens to the economics once the price is broken apart. Take a hypothetical business that owns a piece of equipment costing ₦600,000. It could sell it once, or keep it and rent it out for ₦5,000 a day. Rented 20 days a month, it earns ₦100,000 and recovers its price in six months. Rented eight days a month, it earns ₦40,000 and takes 15 months. Those are gross figures: financing costs, maintenance, downtime, theft or loss, logistics and tax would all make the real payback longer. The asset and the price never changed. The difference between six months and 15 is utilisation.

Selling on instalments has its own version of the sum. A business needs to know how much capital is outstanding, for how long, what share of customers miss payments, and what it costs to recover the money or the asset when they do.

Breaking up the price tends to work when four things hold. The asset is expensive enough, relative to customers’ incomes, that a smaller payment solves a real problem. Demand is frequent and predictable enough to keep a shared or rented asset earning, or incomes steady enough to keep instalments coming. The business has a way to limit losses, through deposits, identity checks, contracts or the ability to recover the asset. And the smaller payment still leaves a margin after financing and operating costs. It helps to make each payment worth more than a slice of the original price, the way M-KOPA adds insurance and Shuttlers adds a named driver and a fare known before the journey.

When those conditions don’t hold, breaking up the price doesn’t make an expensive asset cheaper. It moves more of its cost and risk onto the business, with less certainty about when the money comes back. That is the trade to price before copying the model.

The companies trying it now will show how well these models hold while household budgets stay under pressure. The number to watch is not how many customers sign up. It is how often the seats and batteries earn, and how reliably the phone instalments get paid.

Featured Image credit: Nupo Deyon Daniel