Dure: Bill Splitter & Expenses

Splitting money fairly should not require an account, and it should not require trusting a server.

Dure is a bill splitter and group expense tracker for trips, dinners and rent. The name comes from a Korean tradition of communal labour: work together, share fairly.

■ When you would use it

Splitting the bill after dinner, sharing travel costs with friends, dividing rent and groceries with flatmates, collecting club or society dues, or just splitting lunch. Whoever ends up as treasurer stops juggling a calculator and a notes app.

■ Why this one is different

Expense apps have been giving up one of two things. The ones you can use without signing up stay thin on features. The ones with real features ask you to create an account, or put exporting behind a payment.

Dure keeps both. There is no server, so there are no running costs. With no running costs there is no reason to build a paywall. That is not a promise, it is the architecture.

■ No account, no server

- No sign-up, no login, no email
- No access to your contacts or photo library. Members are just names
- Your expense records never leave your phone
- In airplane mode everything works except ads

■ Every feature is free

PDF and CSV export are free. Nothing is locked, there is no daily limit, there is no premium tier. There are no in-app purchases and no subscriptions at all.

■ The arithmetic holds

- Four ways to split: equally, by amount, by shares, and item by item
- Accurate to the smallest unit. Everyone's shares always add up to the total
- Settles in the fewest transfers. Five people sending ten times becomes four
- Optional rounding, useful when you want clean numbers
- Handles expenses paid by more than one person

■ It shows you how it got there

Who paid what, who owed what, and how the difference turns into transfers, laid out as a table and a diagram. You can watch the balances sum to zero. Rather than asking you to trust the maths, it shows you the maths.

■ Share a group without a server

Hand the group over as a QR code, a link, or a file. The other person scans it and the expenses merge. Before anything merges you see exactly what changes and what your balance becomes. The QR works face to face even with no signal at all.

■ For travelling

Over 150 currencies. The exchange rate at the moment you enter an expense is locked to that expense, so later rate changes never alter past settlements. You can also type a rate yourself, which is more accurate if you exchanged cash.

■ Receipts, item by item

Attach a photo of the receipt and assign each line to whoever ordered it. Tax and service charges are divided in proportion to what each person ate, not split evenly by head count. Nobody who ordered a salad pays tax on someone else's steak.

■ After the settlement

- One-tap copy of bank details
- Open your transfer app directly, with the apps installed on your phone listed first
- Mark who has paid and track the progress
- Save the summary as an image and share it

■ For groups that last

Register recurring costs like rent and utilities and Dure reminds you when they are due. You confirm, then it is added. Nothing is created behind your back. There are also statistics by category, by person and by month, plus budgets.

■ Comfortable to read

Dark mode. The app itself speaks your language:

English · 한국어 · 日本語 · 简体中文 · 繁體中文 · Deutsch · Français · Español

The layout holds at 200% system font size, and screen readers read the amounts aloud.

■ Being straight with you

Having no server is not all upside. If you lose your phone or delete the app, we have no way to restore your data, because we never had any of it. Please make a backup file from the settings screen.

There are ads. That is how this stays free. They are kept off every screen where you enter or check an amount, and off the settings screen. Putting an ad next to the control for managing ad consent did not seem right to us.

Instead of reaching for a calculator when the evening ends, open Dure.