Show HN: my first product - a simple cost sharing tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: my first product - a simple cost sharing tool

splitacost.com

24 pointsnclrhombre49 comments

This is great. I've been using essentially this same thing in spreadsheet form for years in multiple different room-mate situations. Based on our usage patterns in the spreadsheet version, I would recommend a few changes:

* checking to see who is ahead and who is behind is the operation we used most often. We would check this before we went to buy groceries to see who should pay this week. Same for bills. I know there is the balance tab, but it isn't immediately clear to go there, and I was afraid that when I clicked settle debts that my transactions would/had been cleaned out too.

* shift-tab doesn't go to the previous field when adding transaction

* adding a date field is very helpful for remembering what a transaction was

* in our spreadsheet, my girlfriend and I split most things evenly, but split food 60%/40%. It would be nice, as another poster said if we could at least have some kind of uneven split and so we could set up two pages, one for food and one for everything else. Even better would be to allow choosing that for each transaction, or for a set of transactions, but I understand that may complicate things more than you want to.

* auto-complete on who paid and for what from existing transactions.

* reverse chronological order - if you use this for any amount of time, you want to see the most recent transaction more often than the old ones. May I recommend the new transaction fields go at the top of the page and push older transaction down the page as they are created?

All that said, We probably won't switch since I have a working custom version, but it has been a system that my room-mates and I swear by, so I hope you can make it work for other people too.

Thank you!

Thanks, this is very useful!

* maybe coloring the names red/green (behind/ahead) would solve this? (hovering the names shows a popup with info on hovered person's balance)

* shift-tab went straight the todo-list

* date fields.. * and uneven splits: yep, in certain situations both could be very useful. Maybe a "more" button that shows extra options like these when recording a Payment/Transfer would be nice.

* auto-complete should actually work already with names. I'll add it to the "for what" field also.

* this splits opinions I think. for me it's more natural to add new stuff to the bottom than to the top. The page scrolls to the bottom when new transaction is recorded, so it shouldn't make a big difference anyhow.

It seems like a useful tool, but it's not a product.

(I haven't tried it, but) it looks simple and elegant. However, I can't see you monetizing it.

Maybe you don't care about monetizing it. If you don't care about monetizing it, don't call it a product.

Actually I'm (probably) going to make a non-free iPhone version of this also. Therefore this web-version is either a part of a product, or an ad of product.

product: 1. An article or substance that is manufactured or refined for sale 2. A substance produced during a natural, chemical, or manufacturing process I think this fits the latter

Not sure if an add-on meant that I missed elements of the front page, but it was very bland. You could jump people straight to a demonstration with some presets so they quickly get an idea of what's going on?

As @headsclouds said, shared office expenses are probably a good target for this and you could look to pursue that opportunity specifically with a domain alias and tailored copy pretty easily.

I am in a shared office situation and have expenses that would be perfect to track using this, but it would all have to be crystal clear for me to bother switching from just writing notes on paper (and losing them).

Can't think of a strong way you could monetise this so it might be best to keep it clean and ad free, then have it "Presented by (some company/service relevant to small business types)", whether that's a single sponsor or another business/service of yours.

Edit: Added another participant and noticed the colour-coded data when you mouse over their names. Make it a bit clearer that you can mouseover for that info - maybe a magnifying glass icon.

Maybe you could have 3-5 read-only demo sheets - friends on a trip, shared office situation, someone needing to be paid back for buying the game tickets (I could use it for this right now too), people chipping in for a joint wedding gift, etc.

Probably not missing anything, the front page is text only (+button) currently. And yes, there's definitely room to improve it..

I actually never even thought of the shared office targeting before. It seems I should, it does sound like an opportunity for the concept.

Great job, it's a simple no BS calculator that does exactly what it sais it does. And good call not asking for registration, and going the way of a sharable url instead. I'll be using this. Thanks!

update: I can imagine wanting an account that organizes my urls. It would be cool that have that button on the side, but not push for people to register.

Thanks! Yep, that could be nice feature. I've found myself bookmarking those events in a dedicated folder, but that's not very handy.

I like it too. Neat idea for free service... Any ideas on monetizing it?

Small suggestion : Expenses/Balance links are not immediately visible. I was looking for them at the bottom of the page. edit: better description

Thanks for feedback, I'll have think about the navigation.

Yeap, the monetizing plan is to make a non-free IPhone version that works seamlessly with the web-version. Hopefully the web-version will help to boost the marketing of the IPhone-version.

This would be super useful to us if we could set percentages of the total amount everyone is due.

We share an office with a couple other companies, but the lease is at our company's name, and we always pay for everything and people pay us back.

Since some companies are three people, and some folks here are freelancers they aren't all due the same amount; i.e. there is 10 of us, but my company pays for 2/10 because there's two of us using the office.

Maybe adding this feature would open up your service to more users with our problem users. (We are using a shared Google spreadsheet.)

Jup, but not only percentages but also absolute values.

Was just with my room mate at IKEA. I used my card to pay. Some stuff is for the whole appartment, some stuff only for me, some stuff only for him.

With the current version you can add each item as a separate payment and set the "who should pay" -field to "only". That'll solve the IKEA-case.

Doesn't the app already do that (not the percentages, but the "some for me, some for only him" thing)? The last option of each expense is to pick who should pay for it.

I've actually been asked for this exact feature once before. My response was "you are the only one who would need that", but it seems I was wrong..

Nice site. A little bit of feedback:

- Once you click on "Settle Debts", it's not clear how to get back to the list of expenses.

- I like that you auto-create debts and participants from entries. The downside is that if I make a typo in someone's name, there doesn't seem to be a way to delete that person, even if I delete the transaction w/the typo.

- I mindlessly entered $10000 into the expense field, and it was automatically changed to $9999.99. What's the reason for the $10k cap?

Thanks for feedback!

- Yep, the navigation is a bit asymmetric now. I think I'll add more focus to the navigation bar, and maybe even remove the "Settle Debts"-button.

- Actually there is a way. After you have deleted the last transaction of a person, a small "x" button appears next to that person's name in the participants-list. A bit unintuitive maybe.

- Actually, there are no good reasons for the cap. The best is probably to avoid long rows, but 10k is a bit low for that. I'll raise the cap or remove it completely.

A lot of people are looking to solve the expense-sharing problem...nothing seems to have caught on, though. Off the top of my head:

http://www.venmo.com (has payments)

http://www.billmonk.com (the very first)

http://www.splitterbug.com (now defunct)

The one I use (happily): http://www.splitmybill.ie/

I made this one: http://i.crowdfunded.it

I hope that not requiring registration lifts SplitaCost above these.

It's fun to hope but have you gathered any data that suggests that people are frustrated with having to create accounts for bill-sharing apps?

If you built this to further your own education/skills, great job. If you built this to turn into a product, do your research first or else a lot of your talent/effort/time will be wasted.

No thorough analysis done, just some hours with Google and observations of the way people I know deal with expense sharing (excel/paper).

The problem is real tough: calculating this stuff by hand is painful. And because people still do that, it could be solved better than it already is. Choice between free, easy to use tool and paper is a no brainer (if you know that the tool exists, that is)

--> No signup, because it makes it more likely that you know about the tool. (easier to start using, and a lot more likely to spread)

How many people can I spread this to then? I have no idea, but I think this is the fastest way to find out. If it spreads, awesome, and if it doesn't, I'll just swap to some other project. Not much lost here.

(And yes, education is also a big motivator. This is my first tool after all. I still see some value in just shipping tools some people will actually use, profitable or not. A simple, fast project is good for this.)

Recurring expenses would be useful. For example, my roommate and I pay rent every month and the amount never changes. I should be able to enter this just once.

Also, some sort of payment integration (PayPal, etc.) would be nice so he can come to this page, see he owes money, pay it and have that payment recorded.

Excellent product though, I could see myself using this.

I got lost once I clicked settle debts. There was no visual cue that Expenses were accessed through the menubar at the top of the page. Once I hit "Record Transfer" I was left looking at the debt page with no where to go.

I'll change the menubar to be a bit more flashy (there is a subtle color difference between the selected page and the rest of the menubar. A bit too subtle, it seems)

Wow, it's really similar to a tool I've been working on: http://grouppay.backin.de

Glad to see you share the vision (no signup, just go straight to a unique link).

Wow, you've managed to simplify the concept even more! I guess the lack of money transfers limits this to non-continuous cases tough. (Which might be just fine)

I like the fact that the "landing page" is the tool, hopefully this stays with the finished version also.

This could be just due to the unfinished status, but currently at least it does require awful lot of clicking around with mouse. At least entering the cost of an item right after the name should be possible without touching the mouse. (and it actually took a moment for the first time to notice that you can edit the cost afterwards)

Maybe it would be also good to make a more drastic graphical difference between the names and the items?

Are you planning on adding possibility to mark certain items to be paid by certain people only?

Yeah, I think in the finished version, you would always start automatically at a unique URL, and the app would auto-save.

I agree that full keyboard control would be nice. At the very least, you should be able to tab through fields.

Also, not every user understood the distinction between users and expense items, so you're right about that.

Marking items only for certain people: Hadn't planned to do it in the first version because I didn't know what the interaction would look like, but I like your solution. Also, without this feature, everything works as one page (no need to have a separate page for settling debts).

I like that I don't need to "register" or login/password.......I don't know how this will work with the mobile app you're working on, maybe register the "pages" in the app....anyway

Good work....+1 - Like

Thanks!

Yes, current (early) plan of the mobile version is to store the addresses (+names) of the used Events on the phone. (actually, the Payments/Transfers will probably be also saved in the mobile device, to allow offline use)

Accessing Events created with the web-version for the first time with the mobile app is bit of open question tough. Copypasting the URL is maybe not the user friendliest way to handle this. Creating a user account of some sort for the mobile users might be a better idea..

Can you add a feature? I'd like to take a picture of a restaurant bill, have it automatically OCRed, and share the bill with other people's phones. Each person decides which part of the bill they pay.

Sounds cool alright, but the actual value added is maybe not that big. Everyone should still manually enter data, so just entering the data manually while looking at the bill could actually be faster..

This probably is not the easiest thing to implement either..

Perhaps, but it's something tons of people would use, and it's the difference between people using your tool or not imo.

Did this come out of startup weekend London? There were a couple of teams with similar ideas there and would be great if this was another team who stayed in touch and carried on after the event.

Nope, not from London.

The app doesn't seem to be loading!

the blue spinner never vanishes? Did reload help?

seems very useful. I can't enter numbers in the "how much" field though. (Safari, Mac OS X)

hmm.. strange, works well on my Mac+Safari combination. Wich version of Safari/OS X are you running it with?

Version 5.1 (7534.48.3) OS 10.7.1

The number pad doesn't work for me but the keyboard numbers do. I started to debug but was scared off by seeing all the gwt-* class names. ;-)

WinXP Chrome 16.something (dev channel)

Oh, this is enough info to fix it, I think. Thanks. Numpad probably sends different keyCodes than keyboard numbers, and the (hacky) number field doesn't consider them numbers at all. I'll look into this soon.

Numpad should work now also.

Why is this better than Billmonk?

You need to register to Billmonk, not to SplitaCost

Okay, not convinced that's really a benefit (registration lets Billmonk be more useful), but even if it is, what if I'm already registered with Billmonk?

Then you should probably stick with Billmonk. You're correct, "no signup" is mainly a benefit for those who are not already registered to some competing service, but then again, most people don't use Billmonk.

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