Bill Split

Does the world need another bill split app? What if it’s super accurate and cheap / free? Do the latest AI capabilities change the picture at all?

Splitwise exists at a decent scale, but it’s not really designed for this use case. Many other small apps exist in the app store, with pretty aggressive freemium models that make them hard to test and use for free, killing viral growth potential.

Why I care

See Local connection. Dining in groups at restaurants is a more narrowly scoped activity that checks a lot of those boxes.

Bill splitting is a particular slice of that experience that could build a user base and work outward into other parts of the customer experience.

Status: Prototyped and Parked

This was also a good opportunity to play with building a native mobile app. A few of the technical outputs of the process:

• React Native app for iOS and Android
• Use of OpenAI image processing APIs
• A few rounds of optimizations to play with size and preprocessing to reduce costs and increase fidelity

Technically, I learned

• Pre LLM OCR is halfway decent, but requires a lot of tuning for the use case

Playing with the POC, I learned

• LLM OCR Is better, but still makes errors (on receipts) at a rate that makes the UX a lot less seamless than it should be. OCR is a strong start, but manual override is still required, particularly for the modifier line items that are the crux of the overall experience pain.

Business analysis

Watching people more closely and manually mapping the various splitting scenarios, the primary pain points have existing solutions. Briefly:

1. Dining
   1. Someone plays host and everyone Venmos them a flat split amount
      1. Default behavior
      2. This even split has a bunch of positive social benefit, rather than quibbling over differences.
   2. QR codes are already there for a lot of casual dining where people get very different things
   3. Manually asking the server to put X% on certain cards works fine for a minority of cases. Wouldn’t want to do this all the time, which is where Venmo is default.
2. In a non dining setting, Splitwise is pretty good
   1. Again, a flat split is usually the objective from my experience, so OCR isn’t a huge part of the story
   2. The leveling is among many checks

Fun little technical project, but not worth pursuing.