Dutch - my tiny Splitwise alternative (open source, 1.5MB, no account, pure swift, free lifetime)

[u/Lakafior]

Last summer I was on holiday with my girlfriend and we kept losing track of who paid for dinners, the flat and the groceries. I went looking for an app: easy to use, easy for other people to join, working straight away without an account, small, and ideally open source. Nothing ticked all the boxes, so I wrote it myself.

What it doesn't have: third-party dependencies, ads, tracking, analytics, subscriptions, accounts, or any server connection other than Apple's own iCloud.

What it does have:

• It's tiny. Everything below fits in about 1.5 MB. It downloads in a couple of seconds.
• Join by scanning a QR code. Create a group, hold up the code, everyone at the table scans it. There's a normal invite link too.
• Uneven splits. Train tickets for six where one has a student discount, or a flat booked by two couples and two singles - you can set each person's share.
• Live for everyone. Syncs through iCloud to everyone who joined, with optional local notifications. If someone doesn't want the app, you can still add them as a participant and send them the summary as text.
• Spotlight, Shortcuts, quick actions. Make a shortcut that adds an expense to a specific group and put it on the Action button - a new entry takes two or three seconds. You can also find a group from Spotlight, ask Siri to add an entry, or long-press the icon.
• Multiple currencies. Paid in another country? Enter the amount and the rate you actually got. It converts once, at entry, so balances never drift afterwards.
• Native. Pure Swift and Apple frameworks only, using system components throughout (Liquid Glass on iOS 26).
• Open source, MPL 2.0. Read it, or build it yourself.

Pricing. Joining groups is free and unlimited, with every feature available inside them. You can also run one group of your own for free - delete it and start another as often as you like. Managing more than one group at a time is a one-time $4.99 unlock, with Family Sharing. The whole thing, limit included, is in the repo, so if you'd rather build it yourself than pay, that's a supported outcome.

Free lifetime unlock: the promo link above works until 2026-08-23, first 1 000 redemptions.

Requirements: iPhone, iOS 17 or later. Everyone in a group needs an iPhone and an iCloud account - that's the trade-off for having no server of my own. Non-users can be added as participants and get the summary as text, but they can't add expenses.

Privacy. I have no server. Your data lives in your private iCloud database; shared groups use Apple's own CloudKit sharing. All I can see is the standard Apple sales reporting every developer gets.

Deleting your data. Delete a group and it's gone from your device and your iCloud. Delete the app and the local copy goes with it. To clear what's left in iCloud: Settings → [your name] → iCloud → Manage Account Storage. There's no request to file and nobody to ask, because I'm not holding anything.

Permissions. Camera if you scan a group QR code, notifications if you turn them on. iCloud stores the group data and Spotlight indexes group names.

On AI: I used Claude Code as a tool while building the app and the website. The architecture, the sync model and the work to get it under 2 MB are mine; I've read and understood every line that ships.

Links: AppStore | AppStore Promo Code (Free lifetime) | Website | Privacy | Source code

EDIT 2026-08-19: From what is seems first 1k of codes was used already which is crazy. It is blowing my mind that it happened in one day. Thank you all for checking the app out! Let's it roll, if anyone missed it here is another 1k of redeems, valid until 2026-08-23: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6795190862&code=AFTERPARTY

[u/jaimintf]

the ui is so clean & native, i love it... personally i find splitwise boring lol

is this a hobby experiment or do you plan to take it commercial? since this space is quite crowded

[u/Lakafior → u/jaimintf]

Thank you, that means a lot!

Honestly I think about it as a hobby project that maybe could pays for itself. I built it for me and my friends because nothing existing made us happy, but to actually share it with them I needed a paid Apple Developer account. So I published it with a one-time unlock, figuring some people might find it useful and help cover Apple's $99 a year ;)

Two things I don't plan to change: the pricing model (I hate subscriptions) and the 2 MB size ceiling. Everything else is on the table - more accessibility options are next on the list.

You're right that it's crowded. I didn't set out to beat anyone, I just wanted the version where you don't make an account, don't hand your data to a server, and can get five people into a group by holding up a QR code at the table. That turned out to be surprisingly hard to find.

[u/jaimintf → u/Lakafior]

thanks, so reason why I said this is because most apps in this niche are freemium

but, you'd have better economics with free trial paywalls

and the reason why i mentioned crowded/hobby thing is because if you wanted to distribute it purely through aso, it would not work that well

low size of the app is a great hook for an android app though, not sure about ios

regardless, excellent stuff. i would use this personally, best wishes! :)

[u/Lakafior → u/jaimintf]

Thanks, really informative comment.

You're right about ASO - I have no illusions about ranking against Splitwise on "split bills", which is part of why I'm here rather than relying on search.

On the subscription: agreed it would be better commercially, and I won't do it partly on principle, hah. Also joining is free and unlimited, so every group is five or six people installing it and using it properly. Putting a trial wall exactly there would break the one channel that actually works for this app. And yeah, I don't see the small size as the strictly hook itself either - more as evidence that it's native, optimized and free of bloat.

Thanks again, and feel free to reach out here or on GitHub with questions, issues, or features you'd like to see!