Spliit

Since last fall, a free account on Splitwise lets you enter only three transactions each day. This couldn’t happen with Spliit.

I wrote a new post showing why, for some applications, free is just not enough. We need open source alternatives. https://spliit.app/blog/we-need-an-open-source-alternative-to-splitwise

New feature on Spliit, and a pretty useful one: users can now create an expense by taking a photo of a receipt, thanks to Open AI GPT 4 with Vision API.

More about how I got there in this new blog post.

It has been a requested feature for a long time: it is now possible to upload images and attach them to expenses.

The most common scenario is uploading a receipt, but the feature can be helpful even to store photos and remember what an expense is about, even long time after it was made.

Technical implementation details: the photo is uploaded to an S3 bucket. When the application is self-hosted/self-deployed, it is possible to either provide an S3 bucket or disable the feature.

Short demo in this LinkedIn post.

Deploying an application, even from an open source project, is not always straightforward. Fortunately, Spliit is built with Next.js and only needs a database, which makes it possible to deploy it on Vercel in a few seconds!

On the GitHub repository, you’ll now find a Deploy button, that will trigger a new project creation on Vercel. You’ll be asked to provision a database (without leaving Vercel), and will be ready to use your new Spliit instance less than a minute later 😊

In this LinkedIn post, I broke down what that means and why it makes Spliit a standout choice among expense tracking apps, especially compared to proprietary ones such as Splitwise or Tricount.

Monetizing an open source product is not trivial, but Spliit costs money each month, especially for the database hosting.

A user created a GitHub issue to suggest a way to make donations to support the project, so I set up a simple Stripe payment link. I didn’t expect to receive 4 donations in 2 days, and not small amounts!

Open Source community is amazing 😍

The best with open source is when people start contributing to your project. Spliit is open source (and open to contributions), and during the past few weeks, some features were implemented by amazing contributors:

🔸 You can assign a date and a category to expenses
🔸 You can mark a group as favorite to access it more easily
🔸 You can run the application in a Docker container
🔸 You can split an expense unevenly, by shares, percentage or amount
🔸 You can save which participant you are to populate new expenses’ payer by default

If you’re interested in contributing to the project, by suggesting or implementing new features, check out the app’s GitHub repository 😉

A couple of years ago I created Spliit as a side project to learn the Go language. Surprisingly, around 100 people/day (maybe you?) still use it to share expenses with their friends and family.

It might be related or not to recent changes in Splitwise that make the app barely usable unless you pay for it. Anyways, I thought it would be a good opportunity to give the project some love 😊.

I totally rewrote it (migrating the existing data of course) with a technology I am more familiar with (Next.js, React, TailwindCSS, Prisma…), and made the new version open source! Feel free to contribute by creating an issue or even a pull-request if you want 😉.