Show HN: We made an app for splitting payments with friends ad-free | Hacker News Reader

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

quicksplit.io

6 pointswirelesspotat10 comments

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 don’t understand the need for this and the many apps like it. I don’t understand apps to compute tips either. Automating simple arithmetic doesn’t seem useful to me.

In my experience a group either decides to get separate bills, or they divide the bill up equally. Among friends and with reasonably small amounts I follow the custom “I’ll get it this time, you get it next time.” None of those options require an app.

Looks really nice - well done.

Why did you pick Deno over anything else?

UX is actually pretty good than Splitwise.

Thanks!

such a handy app to have. will save me and my friends so much time and effort trying to split group spendings fairly between us all (especially when it's in a foreign currency)! have you thought about adding in different categories?

Yep! We have a bunch of ideas for features that we can start building now that we've launched the MVP.

That includes categories, activity timeline, receipt scanning, sign in with Apple, and a web app... to name a few :)

Curious why the currency would matter, unless people pay in different currencies. The same math applies regardless of currency.

Yep the split is the same but the conversions back to your base currency that can be a bit of a faff, especially if we're on holiday and doing these calculations multiple times per day

For example if I go to a restaurant with a large group and each item on the bill is in yen, we need to sum each person's total in yen and then convert each of their totals into GBP so we can each transfer what we owe (easy enough)

But depending on the exchange rates and rounding, those calculations can sometimes be off by a penny or two. Some people don't mind, others do

You have different kinds of friends than I do, I guess. If I went out with someone who quibbled abut a few pennies, or even a few dollars (or pounds, or yen), I would insist they get their own check from now on.

Personally I have never participated in a meal that ended with everyone going over the receipt and paying for exactly what they ate down to a few cents. I would consider that miserly, ruining the experience. Why go out at all if you have to carefully monitor every nickel and dime, and worry that someone might cheat you out of a few coins?

That's a fair point - it can vary a lot between groups and it can certainly relate to life stage / situation. Students and roommates are a large portion of the market for bill splitting apps. In my experience those groups tend to care more about splitting things accurately / fairly, perhaps as they have a more limited income

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