Half rent now, half rent later

Trend of the Week

🏠 Half rent now, half rent later

Rent is monthly. Paychecks aren't. Someone finally noticed.

Our algorithm picked this one up recently, and the chart looks like a hockey stick that's late on rent.

The scoreboard: searches for "split pay rent" went from 1,300 a month a year ago to 14,800 now. Two years ago it was 170. It hit 18,100 in April and has stayed near that level all summer.

The plain-English version moved too. "Split rent payment" went from 4,400 two years ago to 8,100 a year ago to 12,100 now.

Wait, what's split pay rent?

You pay part of your rent on the due date. A fintech pays the rest, so your landlord gets the full amount on time. Two weeks later, you pay the fintech back. That's it.

No interest, usually. But it's not free: you pay a monthly membership or a fee per bill. You're basically renting two weeks of time.

Why now?

1. The paycheck math never worked. Rent comes once a month, paychecks usually come twice, and the 1st shows up before the second paycheck does. Split Pay, the startup built on exactly that gap, just raised $125 million in rounds led by Khosla Ventures, with Thrive Capital and Affirm CEO Max Levchin chipping in. When the BNPL guy invests in your BNPL, you're onto something.

2. BNPL moved from sneakers to survival. A LendingTree survey quoted by CBS News in September found 23% of BNPL users have used it for medical, dental or vet bills, or for rent, and nearly 30% for groceries, up from 14% two years earlier. Federal Reserve economists put total BNPL borrowing at $160 billion in 2025, about double two years earlier.

3. The big players showed up. Affirm started a pilot with rent payment company Esusu that splits monthly rent into two installments, interest-free, for a $35 to $50 monthly membership. Back in February, Zip launched Pay in 2, splitting purchases into two payments over two weeks. When everyone launches the same product in the same year, it's a category.

Who's making money

• Split Pay: searches for its name went from 3,600 a month a year ago to 165,000. That's the brand outgrowing the category ten to one.
• Flex: the other big name in rent splitting. "Flex rent" searches sit at 49,500 a month. Its pitch, per CBS: "We're not selling money, we're selling time."
• Affirm and Esusu: a monthly membership on top of the rent. Recurring revenue from a recurring bill.

So what happens next?

• Every big bill gets split. Split Pay already does mortgages and car payments, and its site lists more bills as "coming soon." Insurance, tuition and utilities are the obvious next stops.
• Property managers bundle it in. If splitting rent cuts late payments, it becomes a feature of the rent portal, not a separate app.
• Regulators take a look. A monthly fee on a two-week advance can look a lot like interest. Anyone building here should price that risk in early.

The Pro Move

⚡ Spot the next one first

Split pay rent was one trend. There are 50,000 more.

Pro has every one of them, each with its search history, plus 10,000+ websites and apps on the rise and the Amazon categories people are actually buying from. "Split pay rent" was at 1,300 searches a month a year ago, and splitpay.com had about 30 visits last November. That's when you want to see it.

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Trending in the Group Chat

👀 A duck stole Jensen's keynote

What the internet argued about, starred and installed this week

🐦 The tweet: NVIDIA posted Jensen Huang asking a tiny robot duck for a somersault, and it delivered. 930K views and 11.8K likes. The duck is Microduck, Hugging Face's open-source robot, and the next day Clem Delangue said pre-orders were about to cross 20,000. Move over Labubu, this one does backflips.

🛠 The repo: OpenBot is a desktop app that gives every AI agent its own desk: Claude Code, Codex, Grok, Gemini and more, each with its own workspace, task queue and browser, and they can message each other. 1.7K stars, +176 in a day. Free for non-commercial use only, and it's a preview that runs agents with full access, so keep backups. Your agents have a group chat now. Yours is still the most chaotic one.

🧠 The skill: UI Taste gives your coding agent a design playbook for web and iOS: layouts, hierarchy, polish. 756K installs since September 21, and #1 on the skills.sh trending board. Finally, a fix for "make it look less AI."

🎬 The tool: Claude Duet, Anthropic's new agent that messages you first. It reads your email and calendar, sends a morning brief, runs on its own cloud computer, and asks before it sends, pays or signs anything. Waitlist only, US Pro and Max plans. It's the assistant that finally texts back.

Site on the Rise

🌐 benchlm.ai

The AI model scoreboard everyone's googling

• What it is: an LLM leaderboard. It ranks AI models by benchmark scores across coding, reasoning, agents and more, with API prices and speed next to each one. Free to use, and the data is downloadable as JSON.
• Traffic: about 24,000 visits a month according to traffic estimates, up from about 100 in April, when it started picking up. That's 200x in six months.
• Top keywords bringing the traffic:
  • "ai benchmarks" (6,600 searches a month), ranking #3
  • "llm benchmark" (5,400), ranking #3
  • "chinese model" (3,600), ranking #1
  • "chinese ai models" (1,600), ranking #2
  • "ai models comparison" (1,300), ranking #2
• Insight: one big leaderboard ranks for "ai benchmarks", but the top spots come from slicing it: a page just for Chinese models, a page for non-reasoning models, a compare page. Same data, a new page for every way people ask the question. If you have a dataset, every filter is a landing page.
• Link: benchlm.ai

Breakout App

Pocket: Make Gizmos

Meta's app for making tiny games with a sentence

• What it is: you describe a "gizmo" (a small interactive thing you can tap, tilt and play with) and the app builds it. Then you share it to a feed where people like, comment on and save each other's creations. Think TikTok, but every post is a mini game somebody prompted.
• Launched: Meta quietly put it out this summer, built by the team it hired from the Gizmo app. The US App Store listing went live August 20, 2026.
• Traction: 4.9 stars from about 2,100 ratings on the App Store, and close to 1,000 new ratings a month.
• Insight: Meta isn't selling a game maker, it's building a feed where the content is software. When making an app takes one sentence, the value moves from building to distribution. If you make tools for creators, the next creators make apps.
• Get it: App Store

Down Bad

📉 Cold plunge tubs

The hype cooled off. Fittingly.

• What it is: a tub of ice-cold water you sit in on purpose. Sold as a recovery and mood boost, and a staple of the biohacking crowd.
• The fall: searches went from 90,500 a month at the July 2023 peak to 60,500 two years ago, 33,100 a year ago and 22,200 now.
• The twist: the hot side didn't follow. "Saunas" sits at 246,000 searches a month, up from 201,000 a year ago. People still want the ritual. They just picked the one that doesn't hurt.
• Insight: the ritual didn't die, the home version did. "Sauna near me" alone gets 135,000 searches a month: people want somewhere to go, not something to store in the garage. When a wellness habit sticks, it moves from the product to the place. Sell the visit (bathhouses, memberships, day passes), not the tub.

That's a Wrap

👋 Same time next Tuesday?

You made it to the end. Respect.

Hope you walked away with at least one idea worth stealing. Hit reply and tell me what you're building, what you loved, or what you'd cut. I read every reply, usually with too much coffee.

Catch you next week,

Rachid · Founder, Rising Trends · @rachidseo