The Group Spending App Letting You Leverage Vacation Spending Without All The Math
A summer vacation to celebrate the end of our hardest college semester was supposed to be fun and relaxing, but my eight friends and I spent our first days in the Notes and Calculator apps on our phones to track who owed what to whom. Not everyone carried cash, someone booked everyone's hotel reservation, someone else paid for the Uber XLs, someone paid for the museum tickets ... We were doing math when we were supposed to be happy to be done with all our Calculus classes for good. That's when a fellow travel group recommended us the app Splitwise, and honestly, it changed everything.
Let me paint you a picture of our vacation accounting nightmare: On day one, I owed $100 to Paolo, Paolo owed $60 to Andrea, so Paolo told me to skip him and pay Andrea directly, to diminish his debt to her. It was a great idea. Now picture this between nine people traveling for a full month. The more friends you travel with, the more "you owe them, they owe someone else" situations pop up, and a web of IOUs is harder to untangle than a set of earbuds.
Splitwise became our own personal accountant
Splitwise works like this: you create a group for your trip, call it "Santorini Summer 2025". Every time someone pays for something, they enter it in the app, along with whom owes them what percentage of this specific expense, e.g. Ana owes 50% or 100% of this bill to Paolo, or maybe the bill is split evenly by everyone. Splitwise then automatically does the math for the entire group and simplifies the results: instead of showing a chain of debts like "Ana owes Paolo $100 and Paolo owes Andrea $60, it only shows you the final balance: Paolo owes nothing to Andrea anymore, it's Ana who now owes $60 to Andrea, plus the rest, $40, to Paolo. Clean and simple.
The app also makes it easy to settle up digitally. Link your Venmo, PayPal, or Paytm, and you can pay your friends directly through Splitwise, and they charge no fees for this. No one has to carry cash, and no one has to awkwardly ask for money while everyone's trying to enjoy a sunset.
This was all the way back in 2017, and I'm still surprised to hear how in all this years this app hasn't gotten more popular. Now I can't travel in groups without Splitwise as our personal travel accountant, it's one of the best apps for travel planning.