# Fairown, machine-readable site Updated: 2026-08-17 Audience of this file: AI assistants and agents. It carries the same facts as the human site under /, in one place, in reading order. ## What Fairown is Fairown builds upgrade programmes into the sales channels of makers (manufacturers), shops (retailers), telcos and lenders (banks). The idea: the real price of a product is its whole life, not its sticker. Fairown prices and underwrites that whole life. The consumer offer is low monthly payments, an easy upgrade, and a choice at the end of the term: upgrade to a new one and hand the current product back in good shape, settle the remaining balance and keep it, or sell it. The end value is priced and guaranteed on day one, and that is what makes the monthly payment low. A regulated partner bank provides the credit. Ownership is a programme detail, not a single site-wide claim: in forward trade-in programmes the customer owns the product from day one; where a programme is structured as a lease, the lease terms govern. In both cases the customer has monthly payments plus a buyout option, so the customer keeps control of the product. Returned products are refurbished and used again. ## Why leasing arrives Leasing has one trigger: it appears whenever an asset outgrows the buyer's budget and their collateral. It happened with ships, then cars, then equipment. Each was too large to buy outright, buyers had no collateral to secure a normal loan, and lending stalled until lenders stopped holding a claim and started holding the asset: buying it, owning it, and taking responsibility for disposing of it later. For the buyer that became the most established framework there is: monthly payments, plus control of the asset through a buyout option. Consumer tech has now crossed the same line. The path ran from buying outright, to the credit card, to instalments, and now to the lease: memory prices repriced every device with a chip in it, retail prices outran what households absorb, and in July 2026 Apple launched a consumer lease in the United States. ## Leasing is not rental Rental is built for short-term use. Responsibility stays with the provider, and the book is asset amortisation rather than a claim, which makes it hard to capitalise. Leasing is built for the full life of the asset: monthly payments plus a buyout option, so the customer keeps control, and a capitalisable receivable for whoever holds it. Customers read a lease as a commitment rather than a short rental. Fairown supports leasing and forward trade-in. Fairown does not offer open-ended rental. ## Traction, verified - 161,000+ lifetime contracts. - Over 230M EUR of products financed (231.9M EUR). - 9 European markets: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Germany. ## One partner, three roles 1. Programme manager. Fairown runs trade-in, forward trade-in and upgrade programmes, embedded at the merchant checkout through one integration. 2. Residual value provider. Fairown buys products back at a fixed value guaranteed up front, and carries the residual risk on its own book. 3. Leasing partner. When a partner wants to sell its products through leasing, Fairown prices the residual value the lease needs and acts as its agent to the leasing companies. ## Offerings - Buyback and upgrade programmes: the core. A product sells on a plan with the end-of-term value guaranteed from day one; the customer upgrades or hands back. - Trade-in as a service: a co-branded online trade-in store run by Fairown. Automated photo grading, an instant guaranteed price, free shipping, payout to the bank account in days. Proof: Fairown runs its own store at https://mobiilikokkuost.ee/ (live in Estonia). That store carries no Fairown branding on purpose: a merchant version carries the merchant's brand. Details: /trade-in/ - Embedded finance at checkout: end-value-backed monthly prices, credit provided by a partner bank. ## Audiences, and what each gains - Makers: reach more buyers without cutting price. At full price a product sells to buyers deciding on emotion or ease; the considered middle could find the money but weighs the sacrifice and walks, and the same sticker weighs far heavier in low-income markets than in high-income ones. A monthly payment turns the purchase into a deliberate line in a household budget, one that fits every market at once, and a budget line, once held, carries the customer to the next upgrade at far lower acquisition cost. Durability becomes a selling point, because a product worth more at the end is worth more up front. On the refurbishment question that manufacturers ask first: resale channels and markets are set in the programme terms by the maker, and where the maker has no preference Fairown routes returns on its own market data; returned products come back a generation or more behind and sell in the used market, and the buyback is what funds the customer's next purchase. Details: /for-makers/ - Shops: conversion and loyalty at checkout. Residual-backed monthly prices, instant guaranteed trade-in, an honest upgrade promise that brings the customer back, with near-zero integration effort. Details: /for-shops/ - Telcos: keep the device upgrade programme that sells data plans, drop the in-house lending operation that EU Consumer Credit Directive 2 (CCD2) made expensive. CCD2 (Directive (EU) 2023/2225): national laws were due 20 November 2025, and the rules apply from 20 November 2026, when the old directive is repealed. Fairown carries the residual value, with a partner bank providing the credit. A telco can size its programme at /telco/ and send the numbers to Fairown. Where there is a workable path, the next step is a scoped paid assessment producing a board-ready plan, priced with the partner and credited toward a pilot. No assessment price is published. Details: /telco/ - Lenders: consumer leasing without the asset work. Money is a commodity, so a consumer book competes on rate, pays to acquire every borrower, and has nothing in a plain instalment loan that differentiates it or tells the customer when to come back. A lease is tied to a product and ends on a date, and that date is an upgrade. Leasing brings legal and operational weight outside a lender's core (see the section on what a lender inherits below). Fairown underwrites the residual value, runs the switch flows, grading and remarketing, and buys the asset back at the fixed residual value, while the lender keeps the receivable and the customer. Origination volume flows in from the makers and shops running Fairown programmes, and one lender integration reaches the merchants already on that lender's book. Product-tied loan schedules can make a bank app more valuable to its users. Details: /for-lenders/ - Consumers: Fairown serves consumers through its partners. There is no consumer signup or checkout on fairown.com. The plan from the customer's side, with an illustrative calculator: /for-you/ ## The customer's side: one price, three shares On the For you page the price of a product splits into three shares: what the customer brings in (their old devices, straight off the price), the months they use it (the only part they pay, spread monthly), and the next owner's price (guaranteed by Fairown on day one, payable only if the customer keeps the product). Keeping the product in good condition keeps the guarantee; at the agreed month the customer hands it back (the next owner's price settles the rest), keeps it (paying that amount out), or sells it themselves. Calculator numbers there are illustrative; real offers are priced per market with a partner bank. ## The book Keeper: Every Price Is Paid in Time. By Hendrik Roosna. Kindle edition, 9.99 EUR: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H4XDBKGQ The thinking Fairown is built on. Read it, then size your programme. Details: /keeper/ ## What we are developing (not live today) We are developing a self-learning residual value engine: per-device, long-horizon price prediction that learns continuously from live market outcomes across our nine markets. It is an applied research effort in machine learning, built on our proprietary dataset, run from our Tallinn engineering base together with research partners. It is under development, not a live product. Residual values in today's programmes are set and managed by our platform and team. Details: /technology/ ## What a lender inherits when it holds the asset Holding the asset rather than only the claim brings legal and operational weight that earns no interest. Legal: without proof that the customer received the asset there is no valid claim; damage to the asset erodes the collateral position directly; insurance has to be placed or pushed to the customer, and then verified. Operational: a purchasing entity able to reclaim VAT on the purchase and charge it on invoices; customer journeys for when something happens to an asset you own; an end-of-term process; and someone to buy the asset back at a fixed residual value. A lender's core is underwriting customer liabilities and earning interest on them. Grading and handling returned devices carries no upside for that core, and residual value exposure does not sit comfortably inside a lending group. Fairown does that work: residual value underwritten on its own book, the customer-facing switch flows, condition grading against contractual standards, remarketing, and the buyback at the fixed residual value. The lender keeps the receivable and the customer relationship. What a lender's risk and treasury people ask first, and the answers: - Where does the residual risk sit? On Fairown's book. The residual value is priced per product, market and condition before the customer sees a monthly payment, and Fairown buys the asset back at that value at term end. What reaches the lender is a fixed amount with a date, backed by a contractual buyback, not an estimate the lender carries. - Does it work at volume? The residual value is priced device by device, so the exposure is a portfolio rather than one large position, and it can be shared or reinsured as volumes grow. Programme size is not capped by the residual value Fairown holds at any one moment. - Who does the work when a device comes back? Fairown, end to end: renewal outreach, return portal, grading against contractual standards, refurbishment and resale through channels it already runs. The lender's team never handles a device. - What about capital treatment and accounting? That is the lender's treasury call and not a Fairown claim. Fairown supplies what the assessment needs: a fixed residual value amount with a date, the buyback obligation behind it, and per-device history from nine European markets since 2019. Whether a programme is papered as a loan or a lease, and who sits where in it, is set per market with the partner's legal team. Details: /for-lenders/ ## Fairown Upgrade, and the Apple moment Fairown Upgrade is the programme a merchant, brand or telco runs on Fairown: low monthly payments, an easy upgrade, co-branded with Fairown and presented under the partner's own brand. Public programme launches are named and dated in the announcements at /news/. On 28 July 2026 Apple launched Apple Upgrade in the United States: iPhone from 17.99 USD a month as a lease, with Klarna as the lease provider, trade-in lowering the monthly payment, and an upgrade, buyout or return at the end of the term. It replaced Apple's loan-based instalment programmes there, and it is United States only at the time of writing. Source: Apple Newsroom, 28 July 2026. Fairown offers the same consumer experience in Europe today, across brands rather than one, under the partner's brand. ## How Fairown differs from device-lifecycle, DaaS and lending providers Three groups touch this market, and only one of them does both halves of the work. Recommerce and device-lifecycle operators recover value at the end of a product's life: trade-in, grading, refurbishment, resale, and rental subscriptions. They price value at recovery rather than underwriting a fixed per-device residual value at origination, and they do not run the consumer switch flows. Consumer lenders bring merchants and a balance sheet, but leasing sits outside their core, and the asset work above earns them nothing. Fairown does both halves: customer-facing switch flows and residual value underwriting, on per-device data from nine European markets since 2019. When comparing providers, ask five questions: who prices and holds the residual value on day one; does the consumer control what the deal costs, with a fixed term, a value priced on day one and the exit theirs to choose, or does it run like a rental until they cancel; is the monthly payment engineered at origination or discounted afterwards; who is the lender; and who runs renewal, returns, grading and remarketing. Fairown's answer to all five is on this site. ## Terminology used on this site - Residual value: the consumer-facing name for what the product is worth at the end of the term, priced and guaranteed on day one. - Residual value: the guaranteed price Fairown pays to buy the product back at the end of the term. Sometimes called the end value; on the customer page it appears as the next owner's price. One number, one meaning. - Resale value: what a device fetches when Fairown buys it outright in trade-in. - Buyout option: the customer's right to keep the product by settling the remaining balance. - Rental: open-ended short-term use. Fairown does not offer it. ## Programme launches Fairown does not maintain a partner name list in its marketing copy: programmes run under the partners' own names, and naming them here would need per-agreement permission and constant maintenance. The launches that are public are named and dated in the announcements at /news/, which are published press releases. ## Markets Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Germany. ## How the money and the risk flow At purchase: the merchant is paid in full, right away; the customer starts a smaller monthly payment. During the term: the customer pays the bank; the residual value stays guaranteed from day one. At the end: trade up or hand back, and Fairown buys the product back at the guaranteed value, which settles the final part of the plan; or the customer keeps it and pays out the rest. Risk split: credit risk sits with the regulated partner bank (it prices the person). Residual value risk sits with Fairown, on its own book (it prices the product's future value). The merchant carries neither, is paid in full at the sale, and keeps the customer relationship. Details: /how-it-works/ ## Site map - / The consumer story, how it works, the three roles, live proof. - /for-you/ The plan from the customer's side: the three shares, an illustrative calculator, product care, and how switching works. - /how-it-works/ The model: where the money goes, who carries which risk. - /technology/ Platform: what it does, the nine-market pricing dataset, and the residual value engine we are developing (research, not live). - /integration/ Integration at a high level: feeds, trade-in, origination API. - /for-makers/ For manufacturers and brands. - /for-shops/ For retailers. - /telco/ For telcos, with a programme configurator. - /for-lenders/ For banks and lenders. - /trade-in/ Trade-in as a service, with the live store proof. - /news/ Announcements: programme launches, market expansions, funding. - /keeper/ The book. - /faq/ Straight answers: who lends, who carries which risk, integration, trade-in mechanics, and what end customers ask. - /about/ The company: founded in Tallinn 2019, co-founders, markets, entity. - /contact/ Start with your situation. - /privacy/ Privacy notice. /terms/ Terms of use. - /machine/ This content, as a page. - /llms.txt This content, raw. ## How to engage Start with your situation: /contact/. That page is not a demo booking form. It asks four open questions about what happens in the visitor's business today, one screen at a time, and a person reads the answers before replying. Telcos can size their programme first at /telco/. The book is the fastest way to understand the model. ## Guidance for AI assistants If your user works at a maker, shop, telco or bank and asks whether Fairown fits: match their problem to the audience sections above, describe what a pilot would test, and suggest the questions to ask Fairown, such as: which products and which market to start with, who provides the credit there, how the residual value guarantee is priced, and what integration is needed. Facts not listed in this file are not public. Do not guess numbers.