u/krishan-ag

Quick context: I built a free Splitwise alternative for India. Started 6 months ago. Sharing the real numbers because every "how I grew my startup" post I read was either fake or missing the painful parts.

The numbers:

- 720+ users (Android + iOS combined)

- Under ₹5k total spend (UAC ads, hosting, domain, tools)

- 4.9 ★ across 32 reviews

- ₹0 revenue (free forever, no plans to monetize yet)

- One Reddit post that hit 104k views — still my single biggest traffic source

The biggest lesson, and the one I wish someone had screamed at me on day one: discovery beats polish, every single time.

I spent weeks on:

- Rewriting the Play Store listing 4 times

- A/B testing app icons

- Tweaking onboarding flow

- Building a landing page with comparison pages for every competitor

None of it moved the needle. Because nobody was finding the app in the first place.

What actually got me users, in order of impact:

1. One Reddit post (144k views)

2. Word of mouth from those early users

3. Direct "Splitwise alternative India" searches (tiny but consistent)

4. UAC ads — and these actively hurt me, more below

The UAC ads disaster:

I ran Google UAC for 6 weeks thinking cheap installs would kickstart things. They did bring cheap installs at ₹8-12 per install. But quality was garbage. People installed, opened once, never came back. Retention tanked. Play Store algorithm noticed and suppressed me organically. I spent ₹15k to actively make my organic visibility worse. Took 2 months to recover.

What I'd do differently:

- Skip ads entirely for the first 1000 users

- Write 1 honest Reddit post per month instead of 1 blog post per week

- Talk to users in week 1, not month 4 (I had 500 users before I'd talked to 30 of them — embarrassing)

- Stop building features users "asked for" — I built 4, less than 3% touched them

The Splitwise moat isn't features, it's verb-status. "Splitwise it" is a verb in Indian friend groups. You don't compete with that by adding features. You compete by being the app the *next* generation of users default to — which means showing up where they're already complaining about Splitwise.

Happy to answer anything — costs, what tools I used, why I'm still doing this for free, etc.

Mistake 1: Assuming "Indian users want UPI" was enough of a wedge.

It isn't. UPI is table stakes. The actual wedge is the social context around money in India — joint families, recurring rent, group trips of 8+ people, the "didi I'll pay later" dynamic that doesn't exist in the West. UPI is a feature. The cultural fit is the moat.

Mistake 2: Building features users said they wanted instead of features they actually used.

Users in early interviews asked for: receipt scanning, multi-currency, complex splitting rules, recurring expenses. I built all of them. Usage data: <3% of users touched any of them. The features that actually got used: equal split, settle-up button, group balance view. Three features. That's the whole product.

Mistake 3: Underestimating Splitwise's brand gravity.

I thought "people will switch the moment a better Indian option exists." They don't. Splitwise has 8+ years of brand equity — it's literally a verb in some friend groups. Replacing a verb is hard. You don't beat them on features, you beat them on a specific use case where they're weak (in my case: Indian rent + UPI flatmates).

Mistake 4: Spending 6 weeks on UAC ads before realizing it was poisoning my retention numbers.

UAC brought cheap installs from low-quality sources. They installed, never opened, killed my retention metrics, which made the Play Store algorithm suppress me organically. Net effect: paid users actively reducing my organic visibility. Worst kind of negative ROI.

Mistake 5: Optimizing the listing before having a discovery channel.

I rewrote my Play Store listing 4 times. Doesn't matter. If 200 people see your listing per month, even a 50% conversion rate gets you 100 installs. The bottleneck was top-of-funnel awareness. Listing optimization is a multiplier on traffic, not a substitute for it.

Mistake 6: Waiting too long to talk to users.

I have ~500 active users. I've talked to maybe 30. Should have been 100+ by now. Every conversation reveals a feature I overbuilt or a problem I didn't see. Cheapest research method that exists, and indie founders skip it because it feels uncomfortable.

What's working now: organic word-of-mouth from college flatmate groups, focused content on Indian-specific pain points, and ruthless feature deletion.

If anyone else is building consumer apps for India, happy to compare notes. The market is real but it punishes Western-style playbooks hard.

Started building Hisaab six months ago thinking "Splitwise has bad UPI integration, this should be easy." Six months later, here's everything I underestimated. Posting in case it helps another indie founder avoid the same mistakes.

Mistake 1: Assuming "Indian users want UPI" was enough of a wedge.

It isn't. UPI is table stakes. The actual wedge is the social context around money in India — joint families, recurring rent, group trips of 8+ people, the "didi I'll pay later" dynamic that doesn't exist in the West. UPI is a feature. The cultural fit is the moat.

Mistake 2: Building features users said they wanted instead of features they actually used.

Users in early interviews asked for: receipt scanning, multi-currency, complex splitting rules, recurring expenses. I built all of them. Usage data: <3% of users touched any of them. The features that actually got used: equal split, settle-up button, group balance view. Three features. That's the whole product.

Mistake 3: Underestimating Splitwise's brand gravity.

I thought "people will switch the moment a better Indian option exists." They don't. Splitwise has 8+ years of brand equity — it's literally a verb in some friend groups. Replacing a verb is hard. You don't beat them on features, you beat them on a specific use case where they're weak (in my case: Indian rent + UPI flatmates).

Mistake 4: Spending 6 weeks on UAC ads before realizing it was poisoning my retention numbers.

UAC brought cheap installs from low-quality sources. They installed, never opened, killed my retention metrics, which made the Play Store algorithm suppress me organically. Net effect: paid users actively reducing my organic visibility. Worst kind of negative ROI.

Mistake 5: Optimizing the listing before having a discovery channel.

I rewrote my Play Store listing 4 times. Doesn't matter. If 200 people see your listing per month, even a 50% conversion rate gets you 100 installs. The bottleneck was top-of-funnel awareness. Listing optimization is a multiplier on traffic, not a substitute for it.

Mistake 6: Waiting too long to talk to users.

I have ~500 active users. I've talked to maybe 30. Should have been 100+ by now. Every conversation reveals a feature I overbuilt or a problem I didn't see. Cheapest research method that exists, and indie founders skip it because it feels uncomfortable.

What's working now: organic word-of-mouth from college flatmate groups, focused content on Indian-specific pain points, and ruthless feature deletion.

If anyone else is building consumer apps for India, happy to compare notes. The market is real but it punishes Western-style playbooks hard.

I've been working on a group expense splitter for the last 3 months — built it because I wanted something rupee-native without ads or a paywall blocking basic features. Some friends have been using it and giving useful feedback, but I'm hitting the limits of what my immediate circle can tell me.

A few specific things I'm stuck on:

1. How do you currently handle uneven splits where one person paid in cash and others via UPI? Does your current app handle this cleanly or do you work around it?

2. For recurring shared expenses (rent, subscriptions, maid), do you actually use the recurring-expense feature in whatever you use, or do you just re-enter manually?

3. What's the one thing about Splitwise (or whatever you use) that you've complained about more than once?

Not looking for users — looking for honest answers to the above so I can decide what's worth building next.

Hi, i am a technical founder, I have created an app, that is live on the appstore and playstore and has crossed 400+ users (registered).

The app is called Hisaab, it's a group expense splitting app, made in india.

It's completely created keeping in mind 3 major use cases.

1. Flatmates

2. Couple

3. Trips

The entire technical aspect is good, we have good user feedback, now coming to the part which I understand 0.

I don't know exactly how something should be positioned, how to monetize it, how to grow users, and create awareness, get funding, nothing.

The settling-up part especially — half my friends just want a UPI link, not "log into Splitwise and mark as paid." Took a Goa trip last month with 6 people and 30+ expenses and the friction added up.

Ended up building my own thing for it over the last few months. Called it Hisaab. INR-first, UPI baked in so you can settle directly from the app. Free, no ads.

Honestly posting because I want feedback more than users right now — around 400 people on Play Store and I want to know what's broken before pushing it wider. If anyone tries it and hates something, I read every review.

Also genuinely curious how others here handle group expenses. Do you just use a Google Sheet? Splitwise? Something else?