Splitwise Ratings and Reviews

Good Until You Reach Your Daily Limit

I was using splitwise every month to square up charges between friends (going out, grabbing something from the cafe, a drink spot, etc.) and the app was really handy. It's so easy to find the right people, pick the date, add the expense, and see the totals. Great! This was cool for about a year or so, then all of a sudden I got a notice when I opened the app that I had reached my daily limit of items. Strange, but I'll just put them in tomorrow - no big deal. Tomorrow comes and I go to enter my expenses and what happens? 3 items in, and I have again reached my daily limit?! This was never an issue before - there were times I'd put in 10 or more expenses without any warning. Now the app completely locks me out from entering more than a single new charge each day - only one! It became so frustrating that I completely stopped using the app and went to a custom Google sheet. Nothing fancy, but way more convenient than being limited to one entry per day. And I'm not willing to pay for the premium subscription, but if you are then maybe you'll be fine. Can't say.
If they removed this limit or increased it to maybe 10-20 items, I'd be on board. Until then, I'm not going to bother.

Developer Response ,

Sorry for any confusion! With the Splitwise free tier you can add up to four new expenses per day. If you’re not interested in subscribing, you can wait a day for your daily limit to reset or ask a friend to add expenses on your behalf. If you are experiencing something different, feel free to write to us at support@splitwise.com so we can take a closer look into things. Thanks!

Assumes User Payment Accounts

When someone makes a payment to you with a 3rd party payment option like Venmo or PayPal, Splitwise ASSUMES your Venmo and PayPal accounts use the same email as your Splitwise account. You can’t configure your Splitwise account with a specific Venmo account or PayPal account, nor can you deactivate receiving payments from these 3rd party apps. What this means is… say for example you don’t have Venmo or PayPal… splitwise will still allow group members to make payments to these apps to you using your splitwise email, regardless if that PayPal or Venmo account even exists. When you have large groups, this creates a disaster of people paying into imaginary 3rd party accounts…your mo yeah gets locked up for days in PayPal or Venmo u til you can take your unclaimed money back.

Splitwise NEEDS to refuse payments to 3rd party apps unless a user account has explicitly enabled and configured it as an option. I have a PayPal, but I may not want to ever accept PayPal on Splitwise, but there’s no way I can turn that off.

There is a warning message “you may want to confirm which email your friend uses for Venmo” when Splitwise identifies the risk. But why is that the PAYER’s job??? Of 10 people all get that error message trying to pay 1 person, it’s going to cause a lot of confusion. It should be the recipient’s job to validate their own Venmo email.

Developer Response ,

Sorry you had a bad experience with the Splitwise + Venmo integration! We're happy to help you sort out the issue. Please send a note to support@splitwise.com so that we can look into what went wrong. Thanks!

Gone downhill in recent years

TL;DR See end of review for a better alternative.

This app used to be great, but I haven’t used it in a few years. Picked it back up for a road trip and found that it now bombards you with (timed) ads for premium. I wouldn’t mind dropping $0.99 on it or what have you for the week I’m going to use it, but let’s be real: a decent spreadsheet on any platform with collaboration offers essentially the same value. So, Splitwise has apparently gone the route many apps have of trying to justify the higher price with additional “value” by adding unnecessary features to the premium subscription like bank sync. I don’t want all that: I just want an app that offers an easier UI than the aforementioned spreadsheet. But roping me into a subscription for that essentially offline functionality leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I recommend Splittr as a more reasonable alternative from an indie developer. You can use it entirely free and offline, or you can buy a 1-month “pass” rather than being roped into a subscription you have to cancel. They have reasonably-priced long term options at the time of writing, as well.

For meals, promises a lot, delivers on little

When using this app on my phone, anytime I switch over to my calculator app to crunch some numbers, it closes out of an expense I’m working on. This drives me 100% absolutely nuts because there’s no way to save a draft, your progress, nothing. I had to redo one expense 4 times. That aside, it took me 15 minutes to figure out how to split a simple lunch bill among four people because (1) the UX is a real problem; (2) what in this good Earth is this “shares” feature that has little to no use in real life because no restaurant designs their menus this way and nobody orders this way; (3) not enough development is put into the dollar amount entry feature and why does it give me so many problems about the sum not adding up when I clearly know that it doesn’t and am trying to fix the issue but the app won’t let me leave without deleting everything… I literally needed to find out what the tax rate was for certain restaurants (ones that charge hidden taxes, a fight for another day) and it wouldn’t let me do that without restarting completely. I literally would rather pull out all my hair and an abacus than deal with this app another time and any friend of mine who suggests using this app is disinvited to future hangouts until they learn the error of their ways or this app fixes its problems.

Used to be Great

I used to LOVE this app! I’ve used it for years between different groups of roommates I’ve lived with, and to manage personal expenses with my partner. I love the interface of the app, how easy it is to use, and the different options for dividing expenses. That all changed today. I opened the app today to add in my expenses for a couple recent grocery shopping trips for my roommates and each time I wanted to add an expense I had to wait for ad to play, which was new and annoying, but I dealt with it. Then after I added 4 (just 4!) expenses I was met with a pop-up saying that I had reached the maximum number of expenses I could input today and I had to either upgrade to the pro version or wait until tomorrow to input more. I commonly put in 10 or 15 expenses all at once so I only have to do money management once or twice a month. There is nothing in the pro version of this app that I will use and it’s not worth the money just to be able to add my expenses when just a month ago I could add as many as I wanted to for free; which is why I specifically downloaded this app, as a free way to manage expenses with my roommates and partner. I will be deleting the app today and switching to a different app that allows me to do the same things Splitwise used to do for free.

Love it but...

I love and use this app constantly, to the point that it would make sense for me to use the pro version. So I did the 1 month free trial (thank you) but it didn’t seem worth the money. Specifically because I still can’t itemize transactions on the phone app, only the desktop, and the charts aren’t really helpful. In regards to the charts, if I could tap on a section of the pie chart and have every transaction that’s in that category shown - that would be Very helpful. Also, it’s not very clear on the charts if the total amount shown is the total of what Both people spent (and then split) or if it’s what I specifically spent after splitting expenses (again, would be very helpful to know/have both options). Last feedback is that it would be great if when using the itemized feature, that items could be split by a custom % instead of only 50/50 or 100/0. Fingers crossed these updates are doable! I tell people about this app all the time and it makes my like So much easier by removing the stress of remembering debts, but the above would really help a lot.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your kind words and for trying Pro, sorry it didn't meet your needs!
To itemize a receipt from the iOS app, please scan your receipt then tap the "itemize receipt" button. Subscribers can set a default unequal split for a group (eg 60% 40%), by visiting "group settings". If you'd like to discuss further please write support@splitwise.com. Cheers!

What a nightmare

Completely counterintuitive dumpster fire of an app that is supposed to make communal payments for group events simplified. Instead I’m capped at 5 submissions a day and then demanded to sign up for PRO or wait 24 hours to get the rest of my requests out because I guess regular splitwise can only handle SO
MUCH. We have that in common I guess. Next I’m graciously offered the ability to make requests in every currency in the universe, but wait… I need to get PRO to convert requests before paying them. I guess Ill call my local bank and get the market exchange rates for that day to convert every single entry I already made into USD? Perfect! I love wasting my time. And the grande finale is IF you have the audacity to settle up promptly to pay back your friends you may accidentally RUIN everyone else’s requests that may not have been submitted. But don’t worry this only happens SOMETIMES. The one and only positive is that because “BUGS” it can no longer link payment through Venmo, which is its own very special disaster, that only ever wants me to open a crypto credit card. CANNOT wait to delete this app once I’m “settled up.” It’ll only take about 3 more weeks for everyone to be able to submitted their 5 request a day.

Developer Response ,

Sorry you had a difficult experience with Splitwise. Splitwise keeps your balance in each currency separate. You can adjust your default currency at any time from Account Settings, so new expenses can be added in the local currency where you are traveling. If you're traveling and adding a lot of expenses and needing to convert multiple currencies, you can subscribe for just one month of Pro and cancel at any time. The Venmo integration was disabled due to a bug on Venmo's side. We received notice from Venmo that their next app update should fix this, so we'll shortly be able to re-enable the integration! You can also send a note to support@splitwise.com so we can take a closer look.

Great app! But my friends can’t handle the minimize transactions setting.

I recently tried Splitwise for the first time for a trip with a group of friends. Some friends wouldn’t log into Splitwise. Some friends wouldn’t check their emails. And a couple of friends couldn’t understand how everyone could be settled up if they didn’t pay back the person who originally paid for a specific item. Guys, Splitwise tells you how to settle up to reduce transactions so that everyone comes out the same. Minds were blown. I could literally sense that smoke was about to come out of their ears. Of course, it would have helped if they logged into the app, or checked their email or paid attention by the 2nd or 3rd or 5th time I told them, “Guys, open Splitwise! It literally breaks it all down for you!” Minimum transactions are not for the faint of heart.

Bottom line: Splitwise is great! But after that trip, I may have lost a little bit of faith in the human race.

Don’t bother anymore

I’ve actually never left a review for a app before but after my experience with splitwise I felt compelled to do so. I’ve used it for past couple of years to track expenses with group travel and also split expenses with my ex for our son. My use has been very basic and do not require the use of and of the pro features. Recently they limited the amount of transactions you can input a day to just 4! This is ridiculous as most people input all their transactions at the end of the month or at the end of a trip. The monthly fee they are asking is way to high for normal casual users who just want to use it when they got on trips with friends etc. a app that was so good and useful is pretty much ruined by being forced to watch a ad for the pro version and then being limited to only four transactions. Company seems greedy to me. I’ll just go back to my excel spreadsheets. The multiple other negative reviews should be clear to splitwise they made a wrong business decision here. I guess your idea was, “we are getting popular now, let’s see how we can make more money.” Looks like your decision made you less popular…

Now useless without paying

Really disappointed that Splitwise has decided to put most of their features behind a paywall. I get asking for subscriptions for more premium actions like reporting and maybe even currency conversions, but now they won’t even let you add more than 2 transactions in the same day unless you buy “Pro”. Their entire value proposition as an app is that people can easily add and split their expenses, limiting to 2 per day seems totally arbitrary and makes the free version useless. I’d honestly rather go back to spreadsheets for tracking household expenses with my partner than pay $5 a month just to enter 3 expenses in a day instead of 2. Didn’t even get to see what else they’ve pay-gated because I hit the new entry limit and gave up so quickly. I expect there are still options out there that aren’t so stingy on their Free version features. If not, Google Sheets it is.

I used to rely on this app quite a lot and found it helpful for households and group trips, but now I can’t imagine why anyone would pay for such basic features. Seems like a cash grab where they didn’t consider customer impact or interests at all.