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!

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.