Tamara Review

Tamara is a buy now, pay later provider based in Riyadh. It serves businesses in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and holds a licence in Bahrain. Abdulmajeed Alsukhan, Turki Bin Zarah and Abdulmohsen Al Babtain founded it in 2020. Shoppers can pay in full, split a purchase into three or four interest-free payments, or take longer plans of up to 24 months that may carry a profit charge. The merchant is paid the full order value less Tamara's fee, and Tamara takes the shopper's credit and fraud risk on approved orders. In August 2026 Tamara reported more than 25 million customers and over 130,000 partner merchants. The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) licensed its Saudi company, Tamara Finance, for consumer finance and buy now, pay later in early 2025 (the licence is dated February and SAMA announced it in March). That company's audited 2025 accounts show a net profit of SAR 193 million, after a loss in 2024. Tamara does not publish its merchant rates. Each merchant's fixed and variable fee is set in its onboarding form. Payouts go out weekly on Tuesdays. According to Tamara's merchant help docs, on the default plan they wait until your balance reaches SAR/AED 2,500, and on the weekly plan a payout under that amount costs SAR/AED 25. The published Merchant Terms let Tamara hold up to 75% of each weekly payout and release it monthly, raise fees on 10 days' notice, and end the agreement for any reason it deems necessary. Either side can leave on 60 days' notice.

Estimated annual cost at three realistic processing volumes, using Tamara’s published online rate plus monthly fees. Real costs vary with average transaction size, chargeback rate, and any negotiated terms.

What Tamara is

Tamara is a Saudi buy now, pay later provider and consumer lender headquartered in Riyadh. Abdulmajeed Alsukhan, now its CEO, founded it with Turki Bin Zarah and Abdulmohsen Al Babtain. Its operating company, Tamara Finance Company, was registered in Riyadh in February 2020, and Tamara says it launched officially in September 2020. It was the first BNPL company in SAMA's regulatory sandbox. Shoppers use it to pay in full, split a purchase into three or four interest-free payments, or spread larger purchases over up to 24 months. Tamara approves the shopper, pays the merchant, and collects the instalments itself.

Its regulatory position is strong for its markets. SAMA granted Tamara a permit for deferred-payment (BNPL) activity in June 2023. It then licensed Tamara Finance for consumer finance and BNPL: the licence is dated 2 February 2025 in Tamara's audited accounts, and SAMA announced it on 3 March 2025, and Tamara says it was the first fintech startup to receive a full consumer finance licence. The Central Bank of Bahrain gave Tamara Bahrain the country's first BNPL licence in October 2024. In October 2025 Tamara announced a restricted finance licence from the Central Bank of the UAE for Tamara FZE in Dubai.

Tamara's last announced equity round was a $340 million Series C in December 2023, which valued it at $1 billion. SNB Capital and Sanabil Investments, owned by the Public Investment Fund, co-led it. In September 2025 it announced an asset-backed facility of up to $2.4 billion from Goldman Sachs, Citi and Apollo funds. In August 2026 a Saudi rating agency, Tassnief, gave it an 'A-' investment-grade rating. It reported more than 25 million customers and over 130,000 partner merchants in that announcement, up from 20 million and 87,000 a year earlier. Unusually for a private fintech, Tamara publishes its financial statements. The audited 2025 accounts of Tamara Finance Company show revenue of SAR 1.35 billion and a net profit of SAR 193 million, against a loss of SAR 130 million in 2024. Its unaudited first-half 2026 accounts show a profit of SAR 207 million. These figures cover the Saudi company and its financing vehicle, not the Cayman Islands parent or the UAE and Bahrain businesses. We found valuation figures for 2026 in secondary coverage, but no announcement from Tamara, so we have left them out.

Where it operates

Tamara's business pages describe its merchant products as built for Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and its developer documentation lists Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain. Tamara still runs a Kuwait version of its website, and its 2023 and 2024 press releases said it operated in Kuwait, but it shows no Kuwaiti licence. A Kuwaiti business should confirm availability directly. Merchants can switch on other Tamara markets from the Partners Portal. The Merchant Terms say that doing so binds you to that market's terms, and that Tamara can switch a market off for legal, risk or commercial reasons.

How the merchant model works

You integrate Tamara as a payment method. When a shopper chooses it, Tamara decides at its 'sole and absolute discretion' whether to approve the order. Once you ship, you capture the order, and it is paid in the next weekly settlement less Tamara's fee. The Merchant Terms say Tamara assumes 'all Credit Risk, Fraud Risk and Chargebacks' on approved orders, but they list cases where the risk moves back to you. These include non-delivery or unreasonably late delivery, delivery to an address the shopper did not approve, returns or cancellations the shopper is legally entitled to, advertising that breaks Tamara's rules, incomplete order information, and any breach of the agreement. In those cases you must repay what Tamara has already sent you.

Integration is broad. Tamara has plugins or channel-partner integrations for Salla, Zid, Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento 2, OpenCart, PrestaShop, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, ExpandCart and several regional platforms. Payment gateways such as Checkout.com, Amazon Payment Services, PayTabs and CCAvenue can also carry it. In store you can send SMS payment links, display a QR code for the Tamara app, or activate Tamara on Geidea terminals. A Partners Portal and app handle orders, refunds, disputes and settlement reports. Tamara Ads sells cost-per-click placements in the shopper app. Tamara also markets card and mada acceptance through its Pay in Full product, but it publishes no card processing rates, so it is best judged as a pay-later provider.

Pricing

Tamara does not publish merchant rates. The Merchant Terms define the Tamara Fee as the 'Fixed Fee' and 'Variable Fee' set out in your onboarding form. Tamara's audited accounts describe the merchant fee as 'fixed and variable rates' deducted from the order value before Tamara pays you. Tamara's online-stores page promises 'Clear fees with no hidden costs', but the only merchant charges it publishes are the payout fee (in its help docs) and the dispute fees. The site's Tabby review found the same: Tabby explains its fee structure but not its rates. Terms to note before you sign:

• Refunds: on a refunded order Tamara may 'charge the Merchant or retain (as applicable) any and all Tamara Fees', so you can lose the whole fee on a sale you gave back. Tamara's audited accounts also record 'refund fees' charged to merchants for processing returns, which it does not price publicly. By contrast, Tabby's published UAE terms keep the fixed fee and 2% of the percentage fee on a refund and return the rest.
• Fee increases: Tamara can raise its fees at any time on 10 days' written notice. If you do not object within those 10 days you are deemed to accept. It can also change fees on 7 days' notice if information you gave it proves inaccurate.
• Payouts: according to Tamara's help docs (last updated December 2024), SAR/AED 25 on a Fixed-model payout under SAR/AED 2,500.
• Disputes: USD 5 per dispute lost under Buyer Protection, or USD 10 if disputes reach 1.6% of last month's transactions or 100 in a month.
• Surcharging: you may not charge shoppers more for paying with Tamara. Doing so is a material breach.

Payouts and holds

Tamara pays weekly. Orders shipped from Saturday to Friday are paid by bank transfer on the following Tuesday. According to Tamara's help docs, the default Flexible model waits until your balance reaches SAR/AED 2,500, which can mean several weeks between payouts for a small seller. The Fixed model pays every week and charges SAR/AED 25 on payouts under that amount. Tamara's settlement dashboard mentions a daily cycle, but Tamara publishes no daily option or terms for one. Like Tabby, which pays on Mondays, Tamara is slower than card settlement, and that is a working-capital cost for retailers.

The Merchant Terms give Tamara several ways to hold your money:

• Clause 1.11: it can withhold payment for your first three orders for one month.
• Clause 3.12: it 'may, at its discretion, hold a portion of the Net Amount not exceeding 75%' of a weekly settlement, paid out monthly, 'in case of suspicion or the need to verify the Merchant and their activities'.
• Clause 1.15: it can withhold payment on an order, and all other payouts, while it investigates fraud, a dispute, a change to sale terms or a delivery more than 10 business days late.
• Clause 1.26: it can withhold payouts for one month from each purchase date where it identifies actual or potential fraud.
• Clause 1.21: it can withhold payouts if you do not supply requested KYB or KYC information within 5 business days, and suspend or terminate after 14.
• Clause 4.5: it can withhold any payout while you are under investigation for suspicious activity, or where the law requires.
• Clause 5.9: it can set dispute, chargeback and marketing costs against your payouts without notice, and demand any shortfall within 7 days.

The 75% hold is capped and released monthly, which is more bounded than Tabby's published right to keep a reserve for 180 days or longer. The investigation holds, however, have no time limit.

Contract and termination

You sign a Merchant Onboarding Form that sets your fees, settlement threshold, contract term, territory, governing law and courts, alongside the published Merchant Terms. The terms we read in September 2026 carry no date or version number, and the Arabic version prevails over the English. Either side can terminate on 60 days' written notice, and there is no early-termination fee. Tamara can change the terms on 10 days' notice, and its notices can simply point you to a web page.

Tamara's immediate suspension and termination rights are wide. They include not answering a dispute or Tamara's merchant team within 5 business days, selling digital products such as gift cards or software codes, recurring customer-service or delivery problems, and customers who repay poorly 'compared to other Tamara merchants'. They also include a credit risk profile flagged 'high risk', no transactions for 12 months, a change of control of your business, and a catch-all for any other reason Tamara deems necessary. If Tamara terminates on these grounds, dispute and chargeback costs fall on you. It can offer a remedy period instead, on conditions it sets. Tamara's total liability to you is capped at the fees you paid in the six months before a claim arose. The terms also require legal proceedings between you to be kept confidential.

Reputation and complaints

We found no lawsuit, regulatory fine or enforcement action naming Tamara in SAMA, Central Bank of Bahrain or news sources. Its regulatory record consists of licences. As of 29 September 2026, Tamara's Trustpilot profile (tamara.co) is unclaimed and has only 11 reviews, all one-star, for a TrustScore of 2.0. Trustpilot notes the company has not invited reviews, so the sample is too small to judge by. At least one of those reviews is about an unrelated business with a similar name. The rest are from shoppers, mostly in the UAE. They complain about orders declined after 'pre-approval', a Tamara Smart membership fee (AED 18 to 19 a month) that reviewers say was activated without their clear consent, an admin fee they did not expect at checkout, and slow support. We found no merchant reviews. Shopper complaints still matter to merchants, because those shoppers are your customers at checkout.

Who Tamara suits

Tamara is a near-essential option for a Saudi retailer selling electronics, fashion, furniture, healthcare or travel, where shoppers expect to split payments. It suits merchants on Salla, Zid, Shopify or WooCommerce, and in-store merchants on Geidea terminals, who can absorb a pay-later fee and wait a week to be paid. Several large retailers, including SHEIN, IKEA, Jarir and noon, work with both Tamara and Tabby. It is a poorer fit for low-margin sellers, businesses that need daily settlement, and merchants outside Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain. Before signing, get the fixed and variable fee in writing and check which settlement model and threshold your onboarding form sets. Ask which entity, law and courts the form names, and whether Tamara will agree to return part of its fee on refunds.