Splitwise 4+

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!

Taking away free features

I’m someone who goes through finances once a month. I review all my transaction in all my accounts to check for accuracy and to monitor spending habits. I use that same time each month to enter receipts in Splitwise. This has worked out fine, until a couple weeks ago when Splitwise added a limit to how many receipts a user can enter each day. Now I can only enter four receipts at a time without paying $5/month. The app is now completely useless to me.

This tactic isn’t new for app developers. When apps become moderately successful, they slowly remove all utility from their free versions in favor of pro versions. It’s a bait and switch, plain and simple. LastPass did the same thing, which drove away a chunk of their user base. Splitwise will be “wise” to rethink their approach for the future.

I’ll be deleting my Splitwise account in favor of an Excel spreadsheet. Is the UI less appealing? Will the process be slightly more difficult? Will I be urging friends to abandon the app every chance I get? Yes, yes and absolutely.

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.