PB
The idea
Splitting money with other people is solved in theory and a mess in practice. Existing apps are either bloated with budgeting features nobody asked for, or they leave you doing the mental arithmetic: who paid, who owes, and how to settle it without ten separate transfers. Expensease started from one line I refused to cross: adding an expense should take a few seconds, and settling up should take none.
What it does
You log an expense, choose who it’s split between and how (equal, by percentage, or custom amounts), and the app keeps a live running balance for every person and every group you’re in.
The part people notice is settlement. Instead of a tangle of “you owe Sam, Sam owes Priya, Priya owes you,” a debt-simplification engine collapses the whole graph into the smallest set of payments that clears it. A group of six with twenty mixed expenses settles in two or three transfers instead of a dozen. The native iOS and Android apps share the same backend, so a group is never blocked because one person is on the wrong platform.
How it’s built
Separate native iOS and Android apps, plus the web experience, talk to a Node and Express API backed by MongoDB Atlas. Balances sync in real time so two people editing the same group don’t drift apart. The settlement logic is the interesting part: group debts are modeled as a directed graph, then reduced to a minimum-transaction settlement before it ever reaches the screen. The rest is deliberately boring: JWT auth, stateless API nodes on EC2, assets on S3. A money app earns trust by being dull in all the right places.
Current state
Live on the App Store and Google Play and in active development. I’m still iterating on the everyday flows.
