Tabby
conceptProject Details
A speculative strategy and product case study I put together on my own time. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Tabby.
What I did: product strategy, UX and the business model
Markets: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE
What came out of it: a strategy, a roadmap, eight screens and the metrics I would hold it to
Why Tabby, and why housing
In September Tabby raised its Series F and said plainly that it wants to grow beyond buy now pay later. I took that at face value and asked myself one question: what is the biggest payment Tabby’s customers make every year that Tabby never touches?
Once I wrote it down, the answer was sitting there.
Rent…
I have lived in the Gulf for over twenty years. Anyone who has rented here knows how a move goes. You pay a pile of money before you even see the keys, and the new landlord treats you as a stranger, even if you’ve been the perfect tenant elsewhere. Here is what that looks like in numbers:
- In Kuwait, a KD 500 flat can cost close to KD 2,000 before you even move in, once the deposit, agency fee and lost grace period stack up.
- Riyadh rents climbed 30 to 40% in three years, and plenty of landlords there still want the whole year in one payment.
- None of your payment history crosses a Gulf border let alone carries with you in local moves. Every move starts from zero.
So I designed a Rental Passport: a record of on time rent that the tenant owns and in this concept project, Tabby stands behind it. Landlords accept it in place of deposits, cheques and salary letters, in any market Tabby serves. ‘Tabby Move’ earns the record by splitting the cost of moving in (in similar BNPL fashion). ‘Tabby Living’, a solution for furnished homes at one monthly price, is where it pays off. Risky but potentially a great business move for the brave.
Designing for one person: Sara
To keep myself honest I designed for one person. Sara is 31, an engineer, and has rented in Salmiya for four years without missing a month. Her company is moving her to Riyadh. The landlord for the place she likes wants a year upfront and has never heard of her. Her Kuwaiti bank history stays in Kuwait, and so does her good name.
She is far from an edge case. Saudi Arabia took in roughly 1.2 million expatriates in 2023 and 2024, most of them heading to the capital. Careers in this region are built on moves like hers.
The insight that made me commit
Credit bureaus stop at the border. Tabby does not.
This is where the idea stopped being a feature and became a strategy. Tabby already knows who pays on time, in three countries, across millions of small promises kept. It even shares that behaviour with credit bureaus today. The record exists. It just belongs to everyone except the person who earned it.
In this concept, I flipped the ownership so it can be shared. Sara holds her record, levels it up and decides who sees it, and Tabby’s guarantee stands behind it. Trust stops being local paperwork and becomes something you carry with you.
I nearly built the wrong concept
My first instinct was monthly rent splitting. Then I looked at the UAE and found Keyper already doing it on Property Finder, with a government platform in Abu Dhabi close behind. Splitting rent was never the opportunity. The deposit and the missing record are.
Where it sits
Everyone else in this space lends money. The rent now pay later players finance one lease in one country and charge interest for it. Furnished operators sell premium stays to people who can already afford them. In this concept I wanted Tabby to lend trust, and that corner of the map is seemingly empty.
The strategy: in three moves
I structured it as three moves. Each one funds the next and takes risk out of it.
- Tabby Move turns the deposit, agency fee, first rent, movers and furniture into one bill, split the way Tabby already splits a sofa. Rent from month two flows through Tabby, and the record starts. To own the moment people search, theoretically a good move would be for Tabby to buy a GCC rental listings platform.
- The Rental Passport has three levels, and each one tells a landlord how much rent Tabby will cover if something goes wrong. Landlords pay a small fee and stop asking for deposits, cheques and paperwork. Where the rules require it, a local partner bank issues the guarantee.
- Tabby Living comes last: master leased buildings, furnished by Tabby’s own merchants and rented at one monthly price. Passport holders move in with no deposit and move on to Tabby Home when they settle. Tabby buys or partners with a regional serviced apartment operator for the crews and the know-how it does not have in this segment.
The product
I studied the live Tabby app on Mobbin before drawing anything. The new screens sit inside its real tabs and borrow its patterns, so a customer would read this as a feature they found rather than a new product to learn. (The visuals are my own).
01 · Discover
I put the entry point where people already browse, at the moment they are thinking about a move. The Passport they are building sits right underneath it.
02 · The move bill
The listing tells you the rent. This screen tells you the truth: everything due before the keys. I made the free four payment split the default and put the fees for longer plans right on the button.
03 · Passport setup
Tabby customers already finish an onboarding checklist, so I reused the pattern. Three steps, with the promise stated first: you own this and you decide who sees it.
04 · The Passport
I chose levels over a score. “Tabby covers one month” is something a tenant and a landlord both understand. A number out of 900 is not.
05 · The Riyadh listing
This is the whole case in one comparison: SAR 54,600 the usual way, or SAR 4,200 with a Passport earned in another country.
06 · The landlord’s yes
The landlord is not buying Sara. They are buying certainty. So the screen leads with what they get, then crosses out everything they no longer need to ask for.
07 · Rent that counts
Every payment visibly moves the Passport forward. A short grace window protects real life, and it’s clear that a missed month does not get the same pass.
08 · Where it ends up: Tabby Living
One price for everything, thirty days to leave and a Swap city button. In its final form, the Passport is a key.
The business
I kept Tabby’s own model intact in this concept. Today merchants pay for the four payment split, not shoppers. The Passport works the same way: the landlord is the merchant, and what they buy is a guaranteed tenant. The tenant pays nothing extra.
- Landlords pay a guarantee fee, a small share of annual rent
- Movers, furniture and appliance merchants pay their usual fees on the move
- The acquired listings platform earns listing and lead fees
- Further out, Tabby Living earns the spread on every unit
Every rate in that table is my assumption, and the pilot idea would have to prove it. What matters is the shape: the guarantee fee alone covers its expected loss twelve times over, before anyone buys a sofa.
What I chose not to build
The hardest calls were the things I cut.
- Monthly rent in the UAE. Keyper and the government already offer it. Arriving late means fighting on price for a feature instead of owning a category.
- Financing the whole year. Paying Saudi landlords twelve months upfront puts a year of risk on every tenant. Guaranteeing monthly rent carries a fraction of that exposure.
- A credit score. Scores feel like a verdict and attract regulators. Levels tied to a concrete promise are easier to explain, to trust and to appeal.
- Buying buildings. A fintech on its way to an IPO has no business holding property. Living runs on master leases, with rent tied to occupancy.
How I would know it works
My north star: leases signed with a Passport instead of a deposit. It only moves when both sides believe in it, because the tenant had to share it and the landlord had to say yes.
- Adoption: move bills that turn into rent paid through Tabby
- Landlord trust: the share of Passport applications accepted
- Portability: Passports used in a second country
- Guardrail: claims paid against guarantee fees earned
When I would kill it
I wrote these down before anything else, so a pilot cannot talk its way out of them.
- If landlords accept fewer than a third of Passport applications after six months in Kuwait, they do not believe us, and no amount of design will change that.
- Two quarters in a row of claims beating guarantee fees means I have mispriced trust. I would reprice once, and stop if it happens again.
- Should fewer than one in five move bill customers keep paying rent through Tabby, the record never gets built and the Passport has nothing to carry.
Rollout
If I were taking this into Tabby tomorrow, I would start small: five building managers in Kuwait and one question. What would it take for you to stop asking for a deposit?
Tabby taught the Gulf to trust paying later. The next step is making sure the Gulf trusts you, wherever you land.
+ Sources and notes
AGBI, January 2026: Riyadh rent rises, upfront payment norms, rent now pay later players and expatriate arrivals.
Kuwait Times, 2022: Kuwait deposit and agency fee practices.
Gulf News and Khaleej Times: UAE monthly rent.
Gulf Business and Waya, 2026: Tabby’s markets and Series F. App
This is a speculative portfolio concept, not affiliated with or endorsed by Tabby. The visual design is original. Names, prices and unit economics are illustrative.