I Thought I Was a Genius for Building a Splitwise Clone. Then I Checked the Internet.

I used to love Splitwise to track our dining-out expenses with my wife—it helped us realize exactly how much we were spending. We even started pulling money from our personal savings to cover those restaurant tabs, mostly because we were failing to eat the groceries we bought, only for them to sit there and rot in the fridge!

Long story short, Splitwise added limits that made it unusable for us. I thought, "How hard could it be to build my own?" This was in the pre-AI era, and I spent months agonizing over tiny details—cloud infrastructure, databases, security, authentication, etc. It was just too much, so I eventually dropped the project and went back to letting my groceries rot while dining out with zero control.

Then, the AI boom happened. The hype got to me, and I started building it again—initially thinking, "No one else is doing this." Ha! Of course, everyone is trying to do it, especially with 10 million Splitwise users currently annoyed by the new limits. So, I built my own flavor of Splitwise: KesiSplit.

Right now, I’m proud to say I have a massive user base of three: my wife, myself, and my mom. I specifically built a chat-like interface for the app so my mom wouldn't get confused by complex forms or the mountain of data entry usually required to add a single expense. Turns out, the "Mom Test" is the most rigorous QA standard I’ve ever had to meet.

If you’d like to try it, here is the link: https://kesisplit.com/

At this point, I see more value in learning how AI is evolving and using this project as my "gym" to work out my skills and stay up to date. I’m happy to share what I’ve used so far—which AI tools I’m using and how I got the app to its current state.

And no, I didn’t use Claude Code or Cursor. I don't like their five-hour window constraints; I feel like I'm missing out on a session if I don’t use it constantly, and I’m trying to live a life! But that’s a conversation for another time.