Tech City: Cost-splitting app for house sharers

With an increasing number of people trying to cope with London’s spiralling housing prices by moving into house shares with strangers, Splittable, a new app has been launched to ensure household expenses are divded equally.

The app provides simple visual representations to track expenses, share responsibilities, and manage costs so awkward money conversations can be laid to rest once and for all.

Splittable was founded by property technology entrepreneur Nick Katz, 31 and Vasanth Suberamanian 27, who are based in Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch.

Nick said: “As a flatmate in a London houseshare of six myself, I’m well aware of the struggles and inequalities that can come with sharing costs and duties at home. It usually ends up being left to one person to buy household sundries, pay bills, and generally manage the show at home.

Our mission at Splittable is simple: we want to improve the lives of people in shared accommodation, enabling them to stress less and live more. We’re here for the little people. Our technology provides a financial platform to eliminate the frustration, anxiety and conflict arising from dealing with money in a group setting at home, and as we continue to develop the product with our customers will help these young renters to become the best and smartest householders of tomorrow.”

Head of Growth, Lee Bernasconi, 28, said: “While we are all past university age now, I think every single person on the team has experienced houseshares at university and even the years after. I have been in situations where you are living with three or four other people and cant keep track of who owes who money and there is a miscommunication.!

The site has already been successfully trialled by over 1,000 young renters in London.

Lee added: “There is a huge trust element and one thing that we have experienced in our feedback is how the app helps people avoid awkward conversations about money; it’s quite a sensitive subject to broach but the app shows a running balance of who is in credit and who is in debt in the house. It is as clear as day.”

Lee said the future of the app involved lots of new features such as integrating a transactional feature allowing users to pay for things directly via the app and price comparison options for resources, such as finding cleaners and storage.

He said: “The big grand vision is to build Splittable into a more comprehensive platform. There is urbanisation all around the world; cities are getting more populated and it’s simple economics that people are going to be forced to share unless wages go up in line with property which hasn’t been the case. So now we are seeing more people are looking for solutions which will help reduce the friction with people you they don’t know but also people that they do.

“We are kind of moving from the proptech into fintech – they are both hot topics at the moment, growing industries, and we find ourselves at that interesting space where we are both.”

Splittable has also committed 1 per cent of profits to go towards charitable housing causes.

The app is now available for Android and iOS. For more, visit: splittable.co.