Splitting a bill in a group has real potential to become awkward. Someone always drank more, someone always ate less, someone decides to go to the bathroom exactly when the math starts, and in the end everyone pays the same amount. The alternative is someone opening an expense-splitting app and spending the next ten minutes typing name by name, item by item, like the ancient Phoenicians. All while the poor waiter stands there with the card machine in hand, silently cursing everyone at the table.
I wanted something faster than that. I could not find it. So I started creating FastBillSplit.
The app’s proposal is exactly what the name says: solve bill splitting fast. And that happens in two moves. First: you point the camera at the bill and OCR reads the items one by one, without typing anything. Second, and this is the part I think is coolest, nearby users can join the split simply by opening the app and getting close. No need to add anyone by name, email, or any code.
You open the app at the table, the people at the table open the app, and everyone is already in the same bill automatically. It is proximity interaction, without friction.
The initial focus of FastBillSplit is the most common scenario: the restaurant, the bar, the bill that arrives at the end of dinner.
But a version for trips and shared household expenses is already in development, two contexts where the problem of “who owes how much to whom” drags on for weeks and sometimes months. And I am an orphan of a certain bill-splitting app that, years ago, suddenly flipped the monetization switch and locked some features behind a subscription. I did not like that.
The app is being built right now, and there are more details at fastbillsplit.app, but it does not have a public beta yet. It is coming soon.
My dream is that this app becomes a nightmare for users, but in a different way. It should be the kind of thing you open once at a restaurant, show the whole table, and from then on become the person responsible for installing it on everyone’s phone, in a vaguely threatening tone.