An expense splitter in the browser

For those of us who don't want to give Splitwise our data or money

For those of you who follow an honour system, and don’t split bills between friends and colleagues at all, this might be a good time to turn back because I’ll be talking about an expense splitting application.

In college, most people I knew used Splitwise to split expenses. This carried on to life after it. This was quite annoying to me because,

1. Not everyone is on Splitwise
2. Ads and feature-gating on the free version got too much after a point
3. I’m not exactly happily giving away data about how I spend my money to Splitwise

So here is what I want,

1. Something that everyone with a smartphone can use, without having to login, or create a new account
2. No ads, or feature-gating for something as simple as division
3. No data collection

I imagined this to be quite easy so I built it and called it halfsies. It uses URL fragments for storing state which can be sent around using an encrypted messaging app like Signal and all this comes for “free”.