ProductProduction

SplitE

Beyond splitting the bill.

A bill-splitting ecosystem being built around how young people actually share money — before, during and after group activities.

Role: Co-founder & CTO · Lazy Tech Savvy

FlutterFirebaseClean Architecture

Context

SplitE is a bill-splitting application at its core, but its larger vision is to become an ecosystem for young users around group expenses and shared money management. The product is built for Gen-Z users, college students and early-career young professionals, with a particular focus on India-specific group expense and money-management situations. It started from the team's own experience with group activities and the recurring difficulty of managing shared expenses — while investigating the problem, the team recognized that the same friction shows up repeatedly across group activities.

Problem

Group money management doesn't begin when the final bill arrives. There are financial interactions before, during and after an activity, along with related situations like lending money between friends and tracking contributions across a group.

Before the activity

Advance payments
Booking-related contributions
Collecting money from participants

During the activity

Different people paying for different expenses
Different participants contributing different amounts
Shared and individual expenses

After the activity

Calculating balances
Determining who owes whom
Settling the remaining amounts

Traditional bill-splitting products often focus on the settlement moment. SplitE is designed around the broader journey of shared money between people.

Solution

The current core experience: open SplitE, create a group or solo bill, add expenses, record who paid and how the expense is divided, share the bill with members, then settle. Members can join a group bill using a QR code and see changes to the shared bill in real time as expenses are added.

Product Vision

Before the activity· Planned
Collect / contribute· In Development
During the activity· Implemented
Record shared expenses· Implemented
Communicate· In Development
Split· Implemented
Settle· Implemented
Reward· Planned

My Role

Co-founder & CTO — Lazy Tech Savvy.

Built the application from scratch, from architecture and UI/UX through to backend, database design and authentication.
Owned Flutter development end-to-end, including real-time functionality, push notifications and analytics.
Handled deployment and release on both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.
The project now has additional engineering contribution, while Subhajit's co-founder focuses on sales, marketing, user acquisition and business connections.

Key Features

Group & Solo Bills — create either a group bill or a solo bill.
QR-Based Member Joining — members join a group bill by scanning a QR code.
Real-Time Group Bill Sharing — group members see bill changes in real time.
Flexible Expense Records — each expense captures who paid and how it should be divided.
Settlement — calculates the shared expense state so participants can settle what they owe.

Currently Being Built

Group Chat — a chat system attached to each group bill so participants can communicate within the context of that expense group.
Advance Payment — lets users collect money from participants before a group activity starts.

Product Thinking

The original question was "How do we make splitting a bill easier?" It evolved into a broader one: "How can we make managing money between friends easier before, during and after a shared activity?"
That shift moves the product from bill splitting toward group expense management, shared money management, and eventually a broader Gen-Z financial/social ecosystem — this is the product vision, not a claim that every part is already built.
Rewards are part of SplitE's broader product direction, designed to give users an additional reason to keep using the platform beyond a single bill. This is currently on the product roadmap rather than implemented.

Technical Architecture

SplitE is built with Flutter and Firebase using Clean Architecture. Cloud Firestore is the current database, authentication is handled through social login, Firebase Cloud Messaging powers notifications, and Firebase Analytics tracks product usage. The app is deployed to both Google Play and the Apple App Store. As the product grows, the team is working toward a dedicated backend — that migration hasn't happened yet, and Firebase remains the current backend.

Technical Challenges

Problem: The product needed a bill to behave as a shared, collaborative object that multiple members could interact with. An earlier, user-dependent list model wasn't a strong foundation for that direction.

Decision: The bill was modeled as its own individual collection/entity rather than relying on a user-dependent list representation.

Implementation: Treating the bill as shared state — rather than an item belonging to one user's list — means that when one member changes the shared bill, other members receive the updated state without manually refreshing it. This also gave QR-based joining a natural foundation to build on.

Trade-off: This is a more involved data model than a simple per-user list, but it's what makes real-time sharing, QR joining, and future group communication and collaborative payment workflows possible.

Results / Status

Production

Status

Android · iOS

Platforms

300+

Users

Positive · 4–5★

Early Feedback

SplitE has progressed from an internal problem discovered through the team's own group activities into a production mobile product available on both major mobile platforms. The product currently has 300+ users and has received positive early feedback, including multiple 4–5 star ratings, while the team continues to expand the product beyond core bill splitting. Marketing and user acquisition are still in an early, largely internal stage.