While there is no interest charged on your BNPL ... payment plan, micro loan, whatever you call it...

Making the payments on time does not help your credit scores. BNPL deals do not count as on time payments made, they don't count as an expansion of your total available credit, nor your current debt to total credit limit, number of accounts you have, etc...

But if you don't pay them, and you go into collections on them, now they massively hurt your credit.

And if you do, say, suddenly become very injured and miss work, can't make payments... well now you may have many, many, many defaults on all those different BNPL agreements.

Whereas, if the same thing happened, but you only had maybe 1 or 2 credit cards with larger total credit limits, well, that would still be bad for your credit, but probably not as bad as if you had ten or tens of concurrent BNPL agreements you'd been overlapping and chaining.

Also, I am not 100% sure about this, but I am fairly confident that, generally speaking, most credit cards will give you 3 months of missed minimum payments before they send you to collections, whereas BNPL agreements can be... twice a month, once a week, and can trigger giant penalties for you if you miss even one... and then those chain and they can send you to collections even faster.

Again, I'm not 100% sure about all of that last paragraph is totally correct, but... from a consumer standpoint, if you ever miss even a single payment, or a whole bunch of them... you're probably going to be more fucked if your 'loans' are via BNPL then via a or a few credit cards... and BNPL 'loans' are very, very obviously targetted at people who are more likely to miss one or a few payments.

It is extremely predatory.