The Five Best Free Alternatives to Splitwise

Splitwise has long been my favorite app for splitting expenses. The app makes it easy to figure out who owes who, and even works well across multiple currencies. It was amazing until recently, when Splitwise hobbled its free tier to the point of making it a lot less useful: The first couple of expenses can be added for free, but the app now asks you to wait for 10 seconds to add more entries (no big deal), and after four entries, you can’t add more for 24 hours (a bigger deal). 

It’s another example of apps limiting basic, free features to bring in more revenue. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a US$5/month premium subscription for additional features, but you might not want to pay that for the basic feature of adding a few expenses per day. Fortunately, there are still other expense-tracking apps that let you log entries for free.

Tricount lets you split expenses without creating an account

Credit: Tricount

Tricount allows you to keep a tab on who owes who without even creating an account. You can create two buckets of expenses, such as for two separate trips or projects. For more trips, you can create an account and continue logging expenses. The app is easy to use and the free tier is good enough to cover the bases for people looking to split costs. The premium tier is at US$3/month and adds advanced export features, the ability to save your preferred mode of splitting costs, and charts.

You can find Tricount here: Tricount (Android, iPhone)

Settle Up is a reliable alternative to Splitwise

Credit: Settle Up

Settle Up is a good expense-splitting app for those who want to add multiple expense groups without paying. Its free tier offers a lot of what Splitwise used to do, but you might run into ads. The premium subscription costs US$4/month or US$20/year, which would get rid of the ads and include the ability to upload receipt photos. It’s a solid Splitwise alternative at a reasonable price.

You can find Settle Up here: Settle Up (Android, iPhone)

Venmo includes expense splitting now

Credit: Venmo

Venmo is obviously popular to send money to friends but it also recently added a bill-splitting feature. The advantage is that payments are also in the same app, which makes it easier to check how much you owe and to pay. Venmo is a great alternative to Splitwise so long as most of your friends also use Venmo, but not so much if you’re on an international trip with friends from regions where Venmo doesn’t work.

You can find Venmo here: Venmo (Android, iPhone)

Splid is an expense-splitter app without a subscription

Credit: Splid

Splid is a good expense-splitting app for people who hate recurring payments. The app allows you to log expenses in one group for free, and you’re free to keep deleting or editing that group for free, but adding more groups costs a one-time fee of US$4 to unlock unlimited groups or US$3 for a limit of two groups.

You can find Splid here: Splid (Android, iPhone)

SplitMyExpenses is no-frills web-based Splitwise alternative

Credit: SplitMyExpenses

If you don’t like Google Sheets’ UI for expense tracking, you can also consider SplitMyExpenses. It’s a great web-based expense splitter that supports multiple currencies. You can add as many expense entries as you like and set up a custom split percentage based on who owes how much. It has paid tiers that let you automatically scan receipts and add credit cards or bank accounts to log your spending. Its biggest flaw at the moment is a lack of mobile apps, which might be a dealbreaker.

You can find SplitMyExpenses here: SplitMyExpenses