Splitwise?

KINDAYou can build the valuable core, but the established product has meaningful operational complexity. Pick one narrow promise for v1.

BUILD FIRST

One specific customer type and one primary use case
A vertical slice that completes the main job without manual workarounds
Visible limits, review steps, and a fallback when an external dependency fails

LEAVE FOR LATER

Broad third-party integrations
High-scale collaboration, syncing, and permissions
Automation that can cause harm without human review

RESEARCH NOTES

What this tool actually does.

Checked 2026-09-06

Splitwise is a cross-platform app (iOS, Android, web) for tracking shared expenses and balances among friends, family, housemates, and travel groups. Users create groups, add expenses with payer, amount, and date, and the app calculates each member's balance. Splits support equal, exact amounts, percentages, or shares. Core free features include unlimited expenses, groups, IOUs, recurring bills, expense categories, comments, offline entry, cloud sync, 100+ currencies, and simplified-debt calculations that show minimal repayment paths. Settle-up lets users record cash or external payments; payment integrations (Venmo, PayPal, Splitwise Pay, pay-by-bank) exist in some regions. Paid Pro adds receipt scanning, itemization, transaction import from linked cards (US), expense search, charts/graphs, currency conversion with live rates, and default split settings. The product is ad-free; revenue

SOURCES

RESEARCHED BUILD PROMPT

Give this to your coding agent.

Build a focused replacement for the core Splitwise workflow: a shared-expense tracker where users create groups (e.g., housemates, trips, friends), add expenses with payer/amount/date and optional category, and see live per-person balances with a simplified "who pays whom" settlement plan. Include equal splits, exact-amount splits, percentage splits, and shares-based splits. Support expense comments, recurring expenses, IOUs (informal debts), and recording settle-up payments made outside the app. Implement a web app with a mobile-friendly responsive UI that works offline-first (local storage) and syncs when back online using a simple backend or hosted sync service. Use a SQL database for persistence and a REST or GraphQL API. Auth via email/password or OAuth. Do NOT copy Splitwise's brand, logo, color scheme, layout, or exact UI copy; create an original look with similar information architecture (groups -> expense list -> per-member balance summary -> settle-up view). No receipt scanning, no bank/card transaction import, no payment integrations, no multi-currency conversion, no advanced charts. Deliver a README covering setup, seed data, the math algorithm for netting balances and producing minimal settlements, and known limitations (e.g., no real payments, no currency conversion, no receipt OCR).

Out of scope for v1: enterprise-scale infrastructure, broad integrations, and feature parity with the reference product.

Visit the official product page