Splitwise started charging for basics. Here's what Indian users are doing instead.
Three expenses per day.
That's the Splitwise free tier in 2026. Not three groups. Not three settlements. Three individual expense entries, across your entire account, per day.
If you're on a trip and adding a shared breakfast, a shared cab, and a shared activity entry before noon, you've hit the wall. You'll see the upgrade prompt.
₹700 per month for Splitwise Pro. ₹8,400 per year to use a calculator for your shared bills.
How we got here
Splitwise was founded in 2011 with a straightforward promise: free expense splitting for friends. For years, that's what it was. No ads, no limits, just a clean tracker.
Then came the investor pressure, the need for a revenue model, and the gradual shift toward monetisation through feature limits.
The pattern is a familiar one in consumer apps. Make something free, build a large user base, then start restricting the free tier to push conversions to paid. It works as a business strategy. It's a bad deal for users who built habits around a free product.
The specific irony with Splitwise: the features they've paywalled (expense limits, balance graphs, receipt scanning) are the core functionality. Not premium extras. The thing the app is for.
The India-specific problem
Splitwise's monetisation problem is worse for Indian users than for their Western audience, and for a specific reason.
The Pro plan is priced in USD. At current exchange rates, ₹700/month is roughly $8.50. For reference, a full Netflix subscription in India is ₹649/month. Splitwise is asking you to pay more than Netflix to track who owes you for last Tuesday's dinner.
For a college student or early-career professional splitting a ₹1,200 Zomato order three ways, paying ₹700/month for the app doesn't make sense. The subscription costs more per month than most individual expenses being tracked.
The other frustration: UPI was never a priority
Indian users who stuck with Splitwise through the years of feature paywalling still found themselves hitting a wall at the payment step.
Splitwise tracks debts. Settlement happens outside the app. You pay via PhonePe or GPay, come back to Splitwise, and manually mark the expense as settled. The app trusts you. There's no confirmation, no automatic update.
In a country where UPI transactions settle in under 10 seconds and 300 million people use digital payments daily, "manually mark as settled" is not a feature. It's a gap.
Tired of tracking this manually?
Barabar extracts bills, splits expenses, and settles via UPI. Instant.
What people are switching to
The most common destination for Splitwise switchers in India right now is Barabar.
The reasons are consistent:
- Core features (expense tracking, circles, settling) are free without a daily limit
- UPI settlement actually closes the loop: you pay through the app, confirm it, and the balance clears
- Receipt scanning reads the bill so you're not manually entering line items
- No banner ads inside your personal finance data
There's also a functional design difference. Splitwise was built for a US audience where bank transfers and Venmo are the settlement layer. Barabar was built for India, where UPI is everywhere and the goal is getting money back in your account today, not tracking a debt for six weeks.
The fair counterargument
Splitwise has been building since 2011. They have more integrations, better multi-currency support, and a more complete web app. If you're splitting expenses across countries or currencies, Splitwise still handles that better.
And monetising a free product isn't inherently wrong. Building software costs money. Maintaining servers costs money.
The specific criticism isn't that Splitwise charges. It's that they chose to charge for the core functionality rather than premium extras, and at a price point that doesn't make sense for the Indian market.
What to do if you're currently on Splitwise
If you're within your free tier limits and it's working for you: you don't have to change anything. Use what works.
If you're hitting the three-expense daily limit, or you're bothered by the UPI gap, or you're paying for Pro and wondering if the price is right: try Barabar. Both apps let you export your data, so you won't lose your history.
The switch takes about 20 minutes. You won't miss the upgrade prompts.