Free, no ads, and no limits on groups

What “free” covers today

This post describes kisir as it is today. Here is everything that costs nothing.

• No price to download or use. There is no subscription.
• No ads. None in the lists, none between screens.
• Unlimited groups. A trip, a flat, a birthday dinner, a weekend away. Make as many as you have.
• Unlimited people in a group. Anyone with the link, the QR code or the six-character code can join. Someone who doesn’t have the app can be added by name and is included in every split.
• Export. You can take the whole ledger out as CSV or Excel. That is free too.
• No account. You pick a display name. An optional email only brings your groups back on a new phone.

That is the whole list. There is no “free tier” with a catch hiding below it, because the list above is what the app does for everyone.

Why no ads

kisir is an app about money, though mostly everyday sums: a dinner, a rental car, who covered the villa. But it holds a list of what your friends spent and who owes whom. That is personal, and it’s the kind of screen people look at closely.

I don’t want advertising on that screen, for three reasons.

Ads fight with the job. A bill-splitting app works when you open it, add one expense in a few seconds and put the phone away. An ad is something that wants you to stay. Those two goals pull in opposite directions, and the ad usually wins, because it’s the one that pays.

Ads need tracking. Most advertising works by knowing something about the person looking. An app that shows your group’s spending shouldn’t be the place where that starts.

Trust is the product. Splitting money with friends only works if everyone believes the numbers. A banner next to the balance is a small thing that makes the screen feel like it belongs to someone else. I’d like the screen to feel like it belongs to the group.

Why splitting itself has no limits

It’s easy to imagine an app that lets you split two groups for free and then asks you to do something to make a third. I looked at where a limit like that would sit, and every spot was bad. This is why we didn’t put one on groups or people.

The invite link is how a group gets going. Someone makes the group and sends a link to the chat. Everyone else taps it, picks a name and they are in. Now picture a cap on that moment. The person who was invited can’t join the trip. The person who invited them looks bad. The friend who didn’t want to make an account now has to be talked into something else. A limit there isn’t a small cost to users. It lands exactly where a group is deciding whether to use the app at all.

Groups are small and temporary. People don’t have one group for life. They have the Cyprus trip, the flat, the dinner for a friend’s birthday, the weekend at a rented house. A new group every few weeks is a normal year. An app for splitting costs should be as happy with your tenth group as with your first.

The size of the group is not a measure of how much you need the app. Take a hypothetical. Five friends go out for dinner and Mia pays €86.40. That’s 8,640 cents, and five ways it splits exactly: 1,728 cents, or €17.28, each. Four people owe Mia €17.28, which is 6,912 cents. Mia’s own share is the other 1,728. 6,912 plus 1,728 is 8,640, the whole bill. Nothing is left over. Now make it eight friends, or twelve. The arithmetic gets longer, and the problem it solves gets worse, since a bigger group is where a notes app starts to fall apart. It would be backwards to put a wall at exactly that point.

What free does not mean

Free doesn’t mean the app does everything. kisir does not scan receipts, itemize a bill line by line, handle recurring expenses, connect to your bank or card, move money or send payment requests, set budgets, or run on the web. You split costs, record who paid whom, and see what’s left. That’s the job, and I’d rather it did that well than pretend to do more.

It also doesn’t mean “unfinished”. The things that make a shared expense list trustworthy are all there for everyone: any currency per expense with today’s rate filled in and editable to what your bank actually charged, a history on every expense, and the fewest transfers to settle up. The settle up guide explains how that last one works, and you can read it without installing anything.

Your data stays yours

The export is the part of “free” I care about most. If the numbers are yours, you should be able to take them out. Whatever happens with an app, a CSV or Excel file of your own ledger is yours to keep, sort and send to the one friend who wants a spreadsheet. The export guide shows how, and it works the same for a trip, a flat or a dinner.

Where this leaves you

You can make a group in a few seconds and send the link to the chat. People can join without an account. Add as many groups as your year needs, with as many people as are coming, and see no ads on the way. If you’re planning something with friends, the group trip guide walks through the method step by step.

That’s what we mean by free: what the app does, it does for everyone in the group.