HippoSplit

Every expense-splitting app I tried worked the same way: pick the payer, tap the participants, type the amount, choose a category, save. Repeat that 40 times on a week-long trip and it feels like filing a tax return on vacation. A few apps added AI receipt scanning, but even then the photo just pre-fills... another form. Slow, and nothing like how people actually behave in a group.

Meanwhile, what does every travel group already have? A group chat where people post photos of everything.

So I built HippoSplit around that habit. It is a group chat first. You type "lunch 24.50 split with Anna and Ben" like a normal message, or you just snap the receipt and throw the photo into the chat, exactly like sending a picture to friends. The AI reads it and logs the expense: line items, amounts, currency, category, who paid, how it splits. You can drop a whole batch of photos at once and it detects the separate expenses. Everything the AI fills in stays editable, and the actual balance math is computed by the backend, not guessed by a model, so the numbers can be trusted.

The part I did not expect: the receipt itself carries so much information that logging it used to be the bottleneck. Now that the friction is gone, we capture everything, and that unlocked search. Last month I wanted to know when we ordered a specific dish on a trip, and I just searched for it. Every receipt, item, and amount is a searchable record. It quietly became our group's financial memory.

Why not bank sync or the auto-tracking in a credit card app? For this context, it falls short. On a trip abroad, half the group pays cash, everyone pays in a foreign currency, and no bank feed knows how a dinner splits across six people. A receipt photo in a shared chat captures all of that in one gesture. HippoSplit handles 150+ currencies with live rates, so Bangkok street food and airport coffee land in the same trip without mental math.

Where it stands today:

- Launched publicly a few weeks ago after a month of open beta

- My family and friends use it on every trip now, which was the original goal

- Friends join by link as guests, no signup or install, which turned out to matter more than any feature

- Charts and trends show where the money actually went, and you can export everything

- Web app only for now, no native mobile apps yet, that is the biggest gap

- Free tier includes 7 AI scans a week; Premium removes the cap

The bet I am making: expense apps keep adding features to the form, and I think the form is the problem. Curious what this crowd thinks. Has anyone else replaced a form with chat as the main interface, and did it stick? And what got your non-technical friends or family to actually participate?

Try it here if you want to poke at it: https://hipposplit.com