Should I Build It Should I Build It
20 Apr 2025
Fintech API Payments

Split wise clone rest api with cross platform apps. Able to track ...

...bills and split payment

Confidence
Engagement
Net use signal
Net buy signal

Idea type: Competitive Terrain

While there's clear interest in your idea, the market is saturated with similar offerings. To succeed, your product needs to stand out by offering something unique that competitors aren't providing. The challenge here isn’t whether there’s demand, but how you can capture attention and keep it.

Should You Build It?

Not before thinking deeply about differentiation.

Your are here

You're entering a crowded market. There are already many apps that help people track and split expenses, like Splitwise, Tricount, and others. Our analysis found 27 similar products, indicating high competition. This means you'll face a tough challenge in grabbing users' attention. While the idea of simplifying bill splitting is appealing, as evidenced by the medium engagement and positive discussions around similar products, it's crucial to differentiate your app. You must think deeply about how your "Splitwise clone" will offer something new or better to stand out from the existing options. Your app needs a unique hook to make it worth switching from established solutions.

Recommendations

  1. Start by thoroughly researching existing apps like Splitwise and SplitMyExpenses. Identify their weaknesses and pain points from user reviews and feedback. Look for unmet needs or areas where you can provide a superior user experience or feature set. The criticisms from similar product launches often mention the lack of multi-currency support, integrations with payment platforms, and clunky manual entry for unequal splits. Address these shortcomings in your app.
  2. Focus on a specific niche within the broader market of expense tracking. Consider targeting students, travelers, roommates, or couples. Tailor your app's features and marketing to meet the specific needs of this niche. For example, if you target travelers, prioritize multi-currency support and offline functionality. If you target couples, focus on features that promote financial transparency and communication.
  3. Differentiate your app through innovative features or a unique approach to bill splitting. Explore AI-powered bill importing, automatic tip calculation, or gamified expense tracking. Consider integrating with popular messaging platforms like Slack or WhatsApp, as requested by users of BillSplit. Or integrate with payment apps like Venmo and Zelle for seamless transactions as requested by Splitser users.
  4. Develop a compelling brand and marketing strategy to attract users in a competitive market. Highlight your app's unique features and benefits in your messaging. Use social media and content marketing to reach your target audience. Consider offering a free trial or freemium version to encourage adoption. The comments from similar products indicates that having a clean and modern design is also important.
  5. Prioritize user feedback and iterate quickly based on their needs. Engage with your early users to gather feedback on your app's features, usability, and overall experience. Use this feedback to improve your product and add new features. Implement user suggestions like including a feature to select a preferred tip percentage or a dropdown menu for tip options.
  6. Consider making your API open-source or offering integrations with other apps and services. This can increase your app's visibility and attract developers to build on your platform. Be careful though as some users may see it as not viable as a stand-alone application, therefore you should consider if building it as a feature within an established platform is better.

Questions

  1. Given the existing market, what is the most crucial unmet need in expense tracking that your app will solve uniquely well for your target audience?
  2. How will you acquire your first 1000 users in a crowded market, and what specific marketing channels will you leverage to reach your niche audience effectively?
  3. What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) you will track to measure the success of your app, and how will you use these metrics to iterate and improve your product over time?

Your are here

You're entering a crowded market. There are already many apps that help people track and split expenses, like Splitwise, Tricount, and others. Our analysis found 27 similar products, indicating high competition. This means you'll face a tough challenge in grabbing users' attention. While the idea of simplifying bill splitting is appealing, as evidenced by the medium engagement and positive discussions around similar products, it's crucial to differentiate your app. You must think deeply about how your "Splitwise clone" will offer something new or better to stand out from the existing options. Your app needs a unique hook to make it worth switching from established solutions.

Recommendations

  1. Start by thoroughly researching existing apps like Splitwise and SplitMyExpenses. Identify their weaknesses and pain points from user reviews and feedback. Look for unmet needs or areas where you can provide a superior user experience or feature set. The criticisms from similar product launches often mention the lack of multi-currency support, integrations with payment platforms, and clunky manual entry for unequal splits. Address these shortcomings in your app.
  2. Focus on a specific niche within the broader market of expense tracking. Consider targeting students, travelers, roommates, or couples. Tailor your app's features and marketing to meet the specific needs of this niche. For example, if you target travelers, prioritize multi-currency support and offline functionality. If you target couples, focus on features that promote financial transparency and communication.
  3. Differentiate your app through innovative features or a unique approach to bill splitting. Explore AI-powered bill importing, automatic tip calculation, or gamified expense tracking. Consider integrating with popular messaging platforms like Slack or WhatsApp, as requested by users of BillSplit. Or integrate with payment apps like Venmo and Zelle for seamless transactions as requested by Splitser users.
  4. Develop a compelling brand and marketing strategy to attract users in a competitive market. Highlight your app's unique features and benefits in your messaging. Use social media and content marketing to reach your target audience. Consider offering a free trial or freemium version to encourage adoption. The comments from similar products indicates that having a clean and modern design is also important.
  5. Prioritize user feedback and iterate quickly based on their needs. Engage with your early users to gather feedback on your app's features, usability, and overall experience. Use this feedback to improve your product and add new features. Implement user suggestions like including a feature to select a preferred tip percentage or a dropdown menu for tip options.
  6. Consider making your API open-source or offering integrations with other apps and services. This can increase your app's visibility and attract developers to build on your platform. Be careful though as some users may see it as not viable as a stand-alone application, therefore you should consider if building it as a feature within an established platform is better.

Questions

  1. Given the existing market, what is the most crucial unmet need in expense tracking that your app will solve uniquely well for your target audience?
  2. How will you acquire your first 1000 users in a crowded market, and what specific marketing channels will you leverage to reach your niche audience effectively?
  3. What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) you will track to measure the success of your app, and how will you use these metrics to iterate and improve your product over time?

  • Confidence: High
    • Number of similar products: 27
  • Engagement: Medium
    • Average number of comments: 8
  • Net use signal: 29.9%
    • Positive use signal: 30.3%
    • Negative use signal: 0.3%
  • Net buy signal: 1.6%
    • Positive buy signal: 1.9%
    • Negative buy signal: 0.3%

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.

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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.

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An app that tracks expenses by splitting bills

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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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SplitMyExpenses – Modern bill splitting app w/AI + Bank/CC connections

15 Jun 2023 Personal Finance

Hey HN I'm Brad, the creator of SplitMyExpenses (SME)!I've always dreaded splitting expenses with friends after meals, so I'd usually do it as a batch process after a few weeks. I always dreamed of a tool that fit that workflow seamlessly and couldn't find it, so I did the thing most software tinkerers do, build your own tool!It has evolved substantially over the past few years, from a side project that almost never made it out the graveyard, to a polished web app with powerful API integrations and even AI!Splitting expenses sounded simple up front, but a few challenges worth calling out: - Import expenses via file uploads (.csv, .excel, .txt) 500 different styles and patterns/behaviors (column names, $ positive negative, date styles, etc.) across different financial institutions <-- a massive project within itself! - Money split logic: I wanted to ensure you get all your money back and dividing payments "evenly" turns out to be uneven! I had to pull in a frontend and backend library to do calculations on this (IE: $5 divided by 3 people is: $1.67, $1.67, $1.66) - Charging on payment services: Venmo, CashApp, PayPal, and Zelle all have their own URL/deeplink formats to link into and some don't even allow you to! A big of digging / reverse engineering here to figure this out, but mashing it all together so you don't have to saves a ton of time! - Split logic: Dependent state where all bill splits need to be calculated "together". If you have $10 bill, split between 4 people it will be $2.50 each. Sweet! But if you add one more person, that will change the previously saved splits per person, so you have to save the splits all together. ^ I originally built this as a save per split, but this did not scale well at all and didn't make senseA few cool callouts: - Clean up your expense names automatically: AI summarization / extraction of useful text describing your expenses as you do a file import - Receipt itemization: Using Amazon's fantastic receipt APIs, can extract line items and subtotal + tax + tip, so no more typing that all out - Charts for your effective spending: see how much you are spending AFTER you split your expensesTech stack: Laravel (PHP), Vue.js, and Inertia.jsI'm super pumped to get it out the door last week during my Product Hunt launch, excited to share it with the technical folks on HN who can appreciate some of the challenges here :)Let me know if you have any feedback! Any and all comments are welcome

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SplitMyExpenses 2.0 - Split bills with friends, track balances, and settle up

07 Dec 2023 Artificial Intelligence Personal Finance Productivity

Split expenses with friends, track balances in groups or individually, and settle up using integrated payment apps. Itemize receipts from images, import expenses via file upload, and connect bank accounts and credit cards for hassle-free daily expense imports.

SplitMyExpenses 2.0's Product Hunt launch is receiving positive feedback, with many users congratulating the creator and expressing excitement to try it, especially for managing shared expenses with housemates and during travel. Longtime users appreciate the frequent updates, with one OG user specifically praising the free bill-splitting app's v2 update. Users are also inquiring about the tool's origins, target customer, unique features, and potential mobile app expansion, highlighting unmet needs with similar existing apps.

Users noted the existence of free website alternatives, suggesting potential competition. A user also inquired about the product's ability to handle different currencies and international payments, indicating a concern about global usability and transaction capabilities.

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SplitMyExpenses - AI Powered Import bills, split w/friends, charge on Venmo

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A delightful personal finance tool to optimize your bill splitting workflow to save you time and get paid quicker. Modern UI with keyboard shortcuts, powerful AI features like receipt parsing, and secure integrations to link your financial accounts!

Users express excitement and high satisfaction with the app, praising its clean, modern design and cool features. The app is considered great for shared living, super useful, and interesting. It simplifies city living, particularly tip management, and streamlines bill splitting and expense management with friends. Users recommend it and find it especially helpful for frequent restaurant visits with friends and colleagues. The app is noted to be free, adding to its appeal.

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Splitpro aims to provide an alternative to sharing expenses with your friends. You can share expenses with multiple currencies among groups or individuals and add receipts. It's installable as PWA and supports push notifications. The code is fully open-source!

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Introducing Splito for easy group expense management.

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We made an app for splitting payments with friends ad-free

21 Aug 2024 Payments

Hi HN!Last year, my friend and I decided to build an app for splitting payments with friends.We were on a group vacation and trying to split a bunch of bills every day, but Splitwise's clunky UX and ads kept getting in the way. So we decided to build an app for ourselves that's simpler and just does what we need.We built Quicksplit as a side project - as always, building it took longer than we initially expected :)It's ad-free and always will be. You can add payments in different currencies, add friends (without them needing the app), and manage tabs for vacations, events, or living expenses.Quicksplit is a native iOS app (web app coming next!) - it's built with SwiftUI, plus a touch of UIKit for navigation and to fill in some SwiftUI gaps. The backend API is written in TypeScript and running on Deno.Deno ended up being an interesting choice! It's great when it works (and has improved massively in the past year), but there was still some friction. For example, needing to switch database drivers due to issues with TLS support (which has since been fixed) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯We're running on Fly.io and Supabase (for Postgres). We considered a bunch of managed and unmanaged hosts (like Render, Railway, Hetzner; serverless databases like Planetscale and Neon). We landed on Fly.io and Supabase because they have generous free plans, are simple to scale up if needed, the latency is good, and it saved us from spending an evening gluing together bash and yaml scripts ;)Give it a try and let us know what you think - we’d love some feedback!

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I created an app to help you track and share travel expenses among friends. Here's the story:I was on a trip to Spain with my senior pastor and church accountant.We had a tiring first day. Only I spoke a little of the language but that didn't stop of from getting lost. In the midst of this, we had to buy multiple bus and train tickets and it was easier for one person to pay. We finally made it to our hotel and went out for dinner and my senior pastor paid. There was all these scattered expenses and my curious brain was looking for an easy way to solve this.We could never fight because of money but I had seen many wonderful relationships split because of money and chose to solve the problem. I spent a few hours in the morning pushing out some code and then over the last 2 weeks, I put in some work after my 9-5 and between church and school. Now I have a very buggy product.That's how Splitpool was born.

Protecting friendships from money-related conflicts.

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Splitser - Easily split and settle group expenses

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Splitser is the No 1. app to split, settle and pay all your group expenses. It’s the best pick for groups of friends, families, couples, roommates, travellers, colleagues, clubs, unions, fraternities and sororities, teams, etc.

Splitser is lauded for simplifying group expense management with its clean UI and ease of use. Users appreciate it for resolving awkward check-splitting situations. Many congratulated the launch and expressed excitement. Feature requests include payment reminders, Venmo/Zelle integration, and Zelle payment options. Questions were raised about the app's target audience and standout features. Some users are curious about tracking contributions. Overall, the sentiment is positive, highlighting Splitser as a potentially innovative solution.

Users criticize the product for lacking essential features like payment reminders for group members. Some questioned its competitive advantage over existing apps and its discoverability on Google. Concerns were also raised about the product's viability as a standalone application, suggesting it might be better integrated as a feature within established platforms.

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Users are concerned about the product's monetization strategy and whether it will remain free. There are suggestions to enhance the product by including features such as budget tracking and integration with payment platforms.

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BillSlice - Streamline shared bills

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🔥 Automate shared bills! Track, split, and pay recurring bills with ease. Perfect for friends, roommates, family, and landlords. Our beta web-app has been launched, and we're eager to gather as much feedback as we can! Discover more at https://billslice.io

BillSlice is receiving positive feedback for simplifying shared bill management and removing the awkwardness of requesting payments. Users are excited about the idea and looking forward to using it. There is expressed interest in a bill-splitting feature and potential integration with bill-producing vendors. Overall, the launch is perceived as a cool and interesting idea, with users congratulating the team and wishing them good luck.

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instatab - Split expenses effortlessly

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instatab is a free and user-friendly app that makes tracking and splitting expenses with friends and family effortless. No more trying to keep track of who owes what, or figuring out how to split expenses - instatab does all the work for you.

The Product Hunt launch received positive feedback. Users congratulate the team and express interest in trying the app. Several users appreciate the app's ability to resolve awkward money-splitting situations. One user noted its similarity to SplitWise.

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We were sick of endless Venmo requests and money fights with our significant others, so we built something better. Tandem imports expenses from your cards and allows you to seamlessly track, share, and automate expenses with your partner. Available on iOS.

Tandem's Product Hunt launch received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Users are excited about its ability to simplify expense tracking and bill splitting for couples, improving financial communication and removing awkwardness. Many appreciate its seamless, easy-to-use interface and its potential to replace spreadsheets and Venmo. Several users congratulated the team on the launch and praised the app's functionality and value proposition. Requests for an Android version and availability outside the US were also common, along with suggestions such as transaction source identification for credit cards.

Users criticized the product launch for notification issues, particularly with expense input. The app's inability to handle multiple subscriptions for the same service and the absence of an Android version were also points of concern. Users expressed anticipation for more features and regretted not discovering the product earlier. A significant pain point was the difficulty in identifying transaction sources for credit cards, coupled with concerns about delayed Android releases.

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UnityPay - Simplify Shared Finances

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UnityPay helps couples manage shared expenses. Split bills fairly, track spending, and maintain privacy without linking bank accounts. Available now on Google Play and the App Store. Simplify your finances and focus on what matters most--each other.

Inquiry about UnityPay's handling of multiple currencies for international users.

Asks about missing features for handling multiple currencies.

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Send and split money between various payment apps

26 Jun 2024 Payments

Hi HN! I am a 17-year old high school co-founder and I'm building an app that lets people effortlessly send and split payments between PayPal, Cash App, and Venmo (more platforms coming soon)! I initially came across this problem when I ran a Minecraft server with my friends in freshman year of high school. As our server size grew, we had to worry about how we were going to split the monthly bill. Some of my friends had PayPal, others only had Cash App, and ultimately, it was a hassle when collecting money from everyone. This led to me building PayBridge Technologies.With PayBridge you can seamlessly transfer money between various payment apps without the hassle of multiple logins or steps. We also provide a centralized location where you can easily visualize who has paid you and with what payment method.Right now transactions are slower (for verification purposes), but we are actively working on automating them to make them instant.Start bridging today!Quick demo of a transaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BRBuEt6wdA

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BillSplit - Split bills with colleagues on Slack

12 Feb 2023 Personal Finance Slack Productivity

BillSplit is the easiest way to split & track bills between colleagues on Slack. You can split equally or unequally and track the amount you owe & you are owed in one place. Use it with your colleagues for your next tapri visit or an office party. 🎉

BillSplit's Product Hunt launch received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Users frequently congratulated the team and expressed excitement about the app's ability to simplify bill splitting, especially within Slack. The Slack integration was repeatedly praised for its convenience. Many users highlighted BillSplit's ease of use, helpful features, and its potential to streamline awkward financial communications among colleagues. Several users found it a lifesaver and pointed out its usefulness for expense reporting. Some suggestions were also made, including WhatsApp availability and payment profiles.

Users request broader messenger support beyond Slack, specifically mentioning Telegram and Teams. The manual entry process for unequal splits is criticized as cumbersome. Some users no longer use Slack, limiting the product's utility for them. There are requests for more features, including payment profiles, approval workflows, recommendations, and integrations with expense reporting software.

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