Vegas Split Was a Splitwise Rebuttal

The Question

Vegas Split came from frustration with a category more than from fascination with a product. Splitwise has always felt like a false economy to me: everyone needs an account, nobody remembers their login, and you still have to sort out the actual payments elsewhere. For this Vegas work trip, Monzo Tabs would have been the obvious better answer, except two people in the group did not have Monzo.

So the question became: if the mainstream option is bloated for a small real-world group, can a narrow, dedicated tool do the job better simply by being simpler and more specific?

The Build

This was deliberately hardcoded for the four people on the trip. That was the entire point. I was not trying to build a generic expense-sharing startup. I wanted a working prototype fast enough that the group might actually use it in Vegas rather than defaulting back to Splitwise out of habit.

That narrowness made the build remarkably easy. By fixing the users and the use case upfront, I could skip account systems, onboarding, permissions, and all the normal scaffolding that turns a small utility into a product treadmill. It was a good reminder that a lot of software gets harder because we insist on making it general before it has earned that complexity.

The Outcome

Functionally, the prototype worked. Socially, it did not really win. I had hoped the group would use this instead of Splitwise, but I do not think they did. That makes it a dead project, and I do not have much interest in reviving it as a broader product because I do not think “build a better Splitwise” has been a meaningful opportunity for at least a decade.

The interesting takeaway is almost anthropological: even when a simpler tool exists, people often stay with the familiar mess. That is partly inertia and partly network effects. It also made me more curious about the fact that Splitwise still has a real team behind it. From the outside, that feels surprising. From the inside, maybe distribution and habit matter more than product elegance.

Tech Stack

Web app prototype, hardcoded group logic, expense splitting calculations, mobile-friendly UI