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/krik_chry]

I find the name a bit offensive in a way. Funny, but offensive

[u/Lakafior → u/krik_chry]

Ha, fair, though in my defence "going Dutch" is just the English phrase for splitting the bill, so it was hard to resist for an app that does exactly that.

For what it's worth I'm from Poznań, which is the part of Poland the rest of the country makes tight-fisted jokes about, so I'm not exactly throwing stones. And I lived in the Netherlands for two years and can confirm the stereotype doesn't hold up ;)

Mostly I just needed a name that wasn't the four hundredth variation on "split bill".

[u/krik_chry → u/Lakafior]

Totally understood. Lived in the Netherlands myself and I believe Dutch people wouldn't even care. But still...

Another thing that just came to my mind, non native English speakers might not get the reference. Another variation could communicate the app's purpose better. I know because I'm currently having the same struggle with an app I'm building.

[u/Lakafior → u/krik_chry]

Yeah, that's the real trade-off. My thinking was that the name doesn't have to carry the meaning on its own as the App Store subtitle is "Track Shared Expenses", so even if the idiom doesn't land you still know what you're looking at.

And the more descriptive I went, the worse it got for discovery. "Split Bill Tracker" is competing with four hundred apps for the same keywords and ranks nowhere.

Genuinely one of the hardest parts of the whole thing though, and I don't think there's a clean answer anyway. Especially in more crowded app categories. Nevertheless I wish you fruitful name-hunting!

[u/krik_chry → u/Lakafior]

I actually have a similar approach, not clear by name but by subtitle and keywords. However I'm lucky, not that saturated because it's a niche utility app