A budget for shared homes
A budgeting tool for flatmates that turns who-owes-whom into one clear number.
- Role
- Product designer
- Year
- 2024
- Length
- 4 months
The problem
Flatmates kept a shared spreadsheet that one person maintained and everyone else ignored. At the end of each month, someone did the maths, and someone else disagreed with it.
What we tried
Our first version showed every expense and every person's share. It was accurate and nobody read it. In interviews, people only wanted to know one thing: do I owe money, and how much?
What shipped
- One number on the home screen: what you owe, or what you're owed, updated after every new expense.
- Bills that repeat. Rent and internet are entered once and split the same way every month.
- Settle up, not pay up. The app suggests the fewest transfers to make everyone even, instead of a payment for every expense.
What I learned
Fairness matters more than precision. Letting people mark an expense as "split however we agreed" did more for trust than any rounding rule.