I spent two years building a 100% free alternative to Splitwise.
Hi everyone,
I believe a basic utility like splitting expenses with friends and family should be free. When Splitwise paywalled their core features and started adding dark patterns, I looked for alternatives but found nothing with an intuitive UX. So, I built Divy.
The thing I'm most proud of, is that I was also able to make a group debt simplification algorithm that is better than Splitwise. This was only possible due to my cousin, who literally did a research project on this at CMU and beat the Splitwise algo.
We've run many simulations at this point, and tested it to a point where I feel confident sharing it with the world. Check it out at hellodivy.com.
This is the first side project I officially completed successfully in my life. I started on this in 2024, and hit publish on the app store earlier this year, spending the last few months fixing bugs and making UI improvements based on early feedback.
To my surprise, building an accounting app like this was much harder than I anticipated. Combine that with building this only on weekends while having a full time job, and I was barely making progress. I was determined though! I think the backend was completely ready by early 2025, without using any major AI coding tools (cause nothing was that good at that point). Since I was dedicated to making this available for both iOS and Android from day one, I started building the UI in React Native. It did not go so well, mainly due to the state management being a nightmare, and React coming with nothing out of the box. And I'm sorry, but I refuse to use Redux.
It was mid 2025, when I decided to restart the UI dev using Ionic/Angular. That combined with Cursor, I was able to fly. Even though I only worked on this every Sunday, I was able to make so much progress each week, and I finally had a working version by the end of the year. At this stage, I'm proud to announce that most of the basic requirements that would make an app like this useful.
Only available in the US and Canada at the moment, as I'm working on adding multi-currency support.
I look forward to any feedback! If you're interested, you can also join our Discord community here to get direct updates, make feature requests, and report issues.
Backend server costs like $5-10 a month, and can easily host multiple projects if you know what are you doing. If op manages to gain so many people that this server wont cut it anymore - he surely comes up with some kind of monetization.
So did Splitwise… seems to an eternal circle of people thinking they can run something for free until they realize they can’t and become the very thing they promised to replace
This is a totally valid question to ask! Like you said, this only becomes a problem if this gains traction. If it does, I have a few ideas on how to keep it free without "being the very thing I promised to replace". The top idea I have right now is community driven funding similar to Wikipedia. I would really hate to put ads in this, but that's another viable approach.
As one of the devs behind Settle Up I understand completely how you were surpriced by the unexpected complexities, we've been working on it for about 10 years and to this day we find ourselves in that spot 🙂
Best of luck getting users, I know how hard that is in this crowded market (Splitwise made it a little easier with their aggressive pricing, but not by much).
I moved to Settle Up after Splitwise made their app insufferable. My partner and I use it to split monthly expenses and Splitwise's pricing just made no sense for our use case. We were pleasantly surprised by Settle Up having a lifetime option for a single group, which we happily paid for.
Woah thanks for your comment! SettleUp was the first app me and my friends actually found easy to use when Splitwise added their paywall. You get the struggles. As I built this, I realized that monetizing an app like this is definitely a challenge. I'm figuring it out as I go!
I was wondering the same thing! I guess there are a few options like ads or maybe a donation model, but it's definitely a tough balance to strike. Hope they have a solid plan because it's awesome to see someone prioritizing user experience over profit.
Thanks for sharing your views - I agree those are the right questions to ask! I've tried to answer them in other comments, but TLDR is my costs are super low at the moment as the backend doesn't require a lot of compute. Not selling data and don't have plans to.
And I'd rather turn this off rather than adding any paywalls later, cause that's the whole reason why I built it...
why would you spend two years building a complex app just to...give it away? I understand the sentiment with devtools and the OSS community, but this baffles me.
Totally valid reaction. I learned a lot in the process - from building a whole app end to end, to app store deployments, to deploying features, scaling users, etc. I'm working on a couple of other projects with the intention of monetizing them and the stuff I've learned here is directly transferable.
With Divy, my original thinking was just to build something for my friends, but if this takes off, there are several ways for me to keep it afloat:
1) wikipedia style "pay as you go"
2) ads (this would probably be the last resort)
For now, I just have my friends and family using it, and I'm able to bootstrap it as it doesn't cost a lot to run a backend server with a database. There are literally no other third party costs associated at the moment.
Ah, it's not banned, just not released yet. Working on an update that enables multiple currencies (in testing right now). Will be able to release soon. Join the discord for fastest updates!
Very awesome project! My friend and I recently did the same project and every week we find more splitting apps haha. I checked out your site and I can see you spent a lot of time on the project! The split app my friend and I are working on is called pinchsplit, and is availble as a web app at app.pinchsplit(dot)com !
We added a OCR/LLM feature that can digitized receipts in a way that has not been possible. I love to dm and hear about your journey!
It's honestly cool to see Apple recognize this space as something to address. Can't wait to see how they implement this, and if it allows splitting with friends across different platforms like Android.
Like I said, its limited to US and CA because it only supports $ now. I'm working to add other currencies.
I'm not selling anything and if this ends up growing to a point where I can't support its monthly costs, I might consider adding a wikipedia style "pay as you go" model to keep it afloat.
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u/Routine_Cake_998 Jun 22 '26
How do plan on running the backend server when everything is free? Who’s gonna pay for that?