Should I Build It Should I Build It
17 Apr 2025
Personal Finance Money

An app that help people keep track of expenses between them, ideal for ...

...people like roomates who have to pay rent and bills

Confidence
Engagement
Net use signal
Net buy signal

Idea type: Run Away

Multiple attempts have failed with clear negative feedback. Continuing down this path would likely waste your time and resources when better opportunities exist elsewhere.

Should You Build It?

Don't build it.

Your are here

You're looking to create an app to track shared expenses, primarily targeting roommates or groups needing to split bills. Based on our analysis, this falls into a crowded space where multiple similar products exist. The high number of similar products (n_matches = 9) suggests significant competition. While some existing solutions have garnered positive feedback, particularly for simplifying group living, others face criticism for manual entry requirements, lack of automation, and unclear value propositions. User engagement is medium (average of 4 comments), and there's no explicit buy or use signals to indicate that the existing solutions are particularly innovative or successful. Given the saturation and user feedback, creating a standout product will be challenging.

Recommendations

  1. Begin by thoroughly analyzing the criticism surrounding existing expense-tracking apps. Focus on identifying pain points that current solutions fail to address effectively. The comments from similar apps highlight issues with manual entry, lack of bank integration, and limited multi-currency support. Understanding these shortcomings will be crucial in differentiating your app.
  2. Conduct user interviews with individuals who actively use expense-tracking apps, particularly those living in shared accommodations. Inquire about their current workflows, frustrations, and unmet needs. This qualitative research will provide valuable insights into the features and functionalities that users genuinely desire.
  3. Given the existing competition, explore potential niche markets or specific use cases within the shared expense tracking domain. For example, you could focus on travel groups, event planning, or even small businesses with shared expenses. Targeting a specific niche allows you to tailor your app's features and marketing efforts for greater impact.
  4. Prioritize automation and seamless integration with financial institutions. Implement features such as automatic transaction imports, bill reminders, and intelligent categorization to minimize manual effort. Consider integrating with Plaid or MX for secure bank connectivity, but be mindful of associated costs and security implications. This can be a huge selling point, as a lot of users criticize the other apps because of lack of automatic input.
  5. Explore innovative features that go beyond basic expense tracking. Consider incorporating features such as budgeting tools, savings goals, or even gamified expense management to enhance user engagement. Also consider incorporating location-aware features. However, be sure to validate these ideas with your target audience to ensure they align with their needs.
  6. Develop a freemium business model that offers basic functionality for free while charging for premium features such as advanced reporting, multi-user support, or personalized financial insights. This will allow you to attract a wide user base while generating revenue from power users.
  7. Focus on creating a user-friendly and intuitive interface that simplifies expense tracking. Pay attention to visual design, information architecture, and overall user experience. Conduct usability testing to identify areas for improvement and ensure that the app is easy to navigate and understand.
  8. Before launching, create a clear and concise marketing message that highlights your app's unique value proposition and differentiators. Emphasize the benefits of your app over existing solutions, such as its automation capabilities, niche focus, or innovative features. Target your marketing efforts towards your specific niche audience.

Questions

  1. What specific unmet needs within the shared expense tracking domain will your app address, and how will you validate that these needs are significant enough to warrant a new product?
  2. Given the existing competition, what unique features or functionalities will your app offer to differentiate itself and attract users away from established solutions?
  3. How will you balance the desire for automation and seamless bank integration with the need to maintain user privacy and data security, particularly in light of increasing concerns about financial data breaches?

Your are here

You're looking to create an app to track shared expenses, primarily targeting roommates or groups needing to split bills. Based on our analysis, this falls into a crowded space where multiple similar products exist. The high number of similar products (n_matches = 9) suggests significant competition. While some existing solutions have garnered positive feedback, particularly for simplifying group living, others face criticism for manual entry requirements, lack of automation, and unclear value propositions. User engagement is medium (average of 4 comments), and there's no explicit buy or use signals to indicate that the existing solutions are particularly innovative or successful. Given the saturation and user feedback, creating a standout product will be challenging.

Recommendations

  1. Begin by thoroughly analyzing the criticism surrounding existing expense-tracking apps. Focus on identifying pain points that current solutions fail to address effectively. The comments from similar apps highlight issues with manual entry, lack of bank integration, and limited multi-currency support. Understanding these shortcomings will be crucial in differentiating your app.
  2. Conduct user interviews with individuals who actively use expense-tracking apps, particularly those living in shared accommodations. Inquire about their current workflows, frustrations, and unmet needs. This qualitative research will provide valuable insights into the features and functionalities that users genuinely desire.
  3. Given the existing competition, explore potential niche markets or specific use cases within the shared expense tracking domain. For example, you could focus on travel groups, event planning, or even small businesses with shared expenses. Targeting a specific niche allows you to tailor your app's features and marketing efforts for greater impact.
  4. Prioritize automation and seamless integration with financial institutions. Implement features such as automatic transaction imports, bill reminders, and intelligent categorization to minimize manual effort. Consider integrating with Plaid or MX for secure bank connectivity, but be mindful of associated costs and security implications. This can be a huge selling point, as a lot of users criticize the other apps because of lack of automatic input.
  5. Explore innovative features that go beyond basic expense tracking. Consider incorporating features such as budgeting tools, savings goals, or even gamified expense management to enhance user engagement. Also consider incorporating location-aware features. However, be sure to validate these ideas with your target audience to ensure they align with their needs.
  6. Develop a freemium business model that offers basic functionality for free while charging for premium features such as advanced reporting, multi-user support, or personalized financial insights. This will allow you to attract a wide user base while generating revenue from power users.
  7. Focus on creating a user-friendly and intuitive interface that simplifies expense tracking. Pay attention to visual design, information architecture, and overall user experience. Conduct usability testing to identify areas for improvement and ensure that the app is easy to navigate and understand.
  8. Before launching, create a clear and concise marketing message that highlights your app's unique value proposition and differentiators. Emphasize the benefits of your app over existing solutions, such as its automation capabilities, niche focus, or innovative features. Target your marketing efforts towards your specific niche audience.

Questions

  1. What specific unmet needs within the shared expense tracking domain will your app address, and how will you validate that these needs are significant enough to warrant a new product?
  2. Given the existing competition, what unique features or functionalities will your app offer to differentiate itself and attract users away from established solutions?
  3. How will you balance the desire for automation and seamless bank integration with the need to maintain user privacy and data security, particularly in light of increasing concerns about financial data breaches?

  • Confidence: High
    • Number of similar products: 9
  • Engagement: Medium
    • Average number of comments: 4
  • Net use signal: -1.8%
    • Positive use signal: 7.6%
    • Negative use signal: 9.4%
  • Net buy signal: -3.5%
    • Positive buy signal: 0.0%
    • Negative buy signal: 3.5%

This chart summarizes all the similar products we found for your idea in a single plot.

The x-axis represents the overall feedback each product received. This is calculated from the net use and buy signals that were expressed in the comments. The maximum is +1, which means all comments (across all similar products) were positive, expressed a willingness to use & buy said product. The minimum is -1 and it means the exact opposite.

The y-axis captures the strength of the signal, i.e. how many people commented and how does this rank against other products in this category. The maximum is +1, which means these products were the most liked, upvoted and talked about launches recently. The minimum is 0, meaning zero engagement or feedback was received.

The sizes of the product dots are determined by the relevance to your idea, where 10 is the maximum.

Your idea is the big blueish dot, which should lie somewhere in the polygon defined by these products. It can be off-center because we use custom weighting to summarize these metrics.

Similar products

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Let's Split - Share, track and settle group expenses all in one app

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Let's Split is an intuitive mobile app that simplifies expense sharing for friends, roommates, and travelers, allowing users to effortlessly track, split, and settle group expenses in a user-friendly, secure and fully integrated platform.

The product is seen as a great concept, specifically targeting "broke yuppies" who are perceived to need a solution like this.

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Living with college friends, 99% of my transactions are split amongst people, and as such me and my friends use bill splitting apps a lot. A problem with this is that this has made it very difficult for me to track my expenses. Since different payments are made by different people , part of those would be my expensesSo I thought if my bill splitting app itself also tracked my expenses, if everyone simply used this app to split their payments, each members expenses would get tracked automatically. And this led me to create TrueCentsI'd been working on it for a few months but until now its just been me and a few friends on the app. Now I'd like to get more people to try and use the app, hence this post.Co-incidentally recently splitwise has become very restrictive in its free tier, which makes me think this can be even more useful.The app is made using flutter and firebase currently, but I do plan to switch from firebase if there's significant interest in the productLooking forward to your feedback and suggestions

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Splito: An Open-Source iOS App for Efficient Group Expense Management

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Introducing Splito for easy group expense management.

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I made a super simple iOS app to track expenses

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My Expenses is a very simple app to track expenses for one-time budgets.Let's say you're going on vacations in Italy and you want to allocate $1.500 to this trip. You create a budget "Italy" in 30 seconds and you're ready to go. Each time you make an expense in Italy, you add it to the app in a few seconds and you instantly know you're remaining budget.I'm bored of super complex apps. Yes, they do a lot of things, but it often takes a while to get used to the app and understand all its features.That's why I created this app. I want people to be able to track their expenses in seconds, as quickly and simply as possible.It's available on iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Users discuss the challenges of manual expense tracking and the importance of features like auto-imports, bank integration, and auto-categorization. Many use or have built their own solutions, including Django apps, GnuCash, Tasker, and custom spreadsheets. Some recommend existing apps like YNAB, Lunch Money, and Splid for their automation and multi-currency support, though YNAB's lack of native multi-currency support is noted. Questions about manual entry in YNAB are answered with mentions of Plaid and MX integrations. Users also suggest improvements like voice and location-aware features, parsing bank notifications, and data export options. Design and UI are praised in some apps, and there's interest in multi-platform support and subscription costs. Concerns about app size are raised but countered by the observation that iOS apps generally have large file sizes.

Users criticize the product for requiring manual entry, which is seen as tedious and exhausting, with a lack of automatic input and bank connections exacerbating the issue. The app's purpose is unclear, and the interface is considered cluttered. There's dissatisfaction with the handling of transactions, lack of multi-currency support, and poor integration with other apps. The recent price increase and subscription model have also been met with disapproval. Some users find the app lacks originality and is too similar to existing apps, while others struggle with the complexity and size of the app.

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46
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10.9%
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