The idea of BaatLo was born a couple of years ago – I needed a simple thing: a way to split expenses with friends after a trip. Not a spreadsheet. Not a WhatsApp thread full of “you owe me ₹350” messages. Just a clean tool where everyone could see who paid what, who owes whom, and settle up without the usual awkwardness.
So I went looking for one. And everything I found was either paid upfront, or free with the good stuff locked behind a paywall. The features I needed — just basic, fair expense splitting — were apparently “premium.” The apps that did work wanted everyone in the group to download them from the app store, create accounts, and sit through onboarding screens before a single expense could be logged. For something as simple as splitting a dinner bill, that felt like a lot to ask.
That’s how BaatLo started. Not with a business plan — with a frustration.
What’s in a Name
“Baat Lo” — or “बाँट लो” — is Hindi for “share it” or “split it.” It’s the kind of phrase you’d hear casually tossed around in a group: baant lo, figure it out, just split it. The name captures the whole idea in two words. Split your bills, not your moments. Stop doing mental arithmetic during dinner and actually be present for the dinner.
How It Started
BaatLo is a one-person hobby project. I built it because I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and because it felt like the kind of thing that should exist and be free.
Splitting a bill is one of the most ordinary, everyday things groups of people do. The tool that helps you do it shouldn’t be a subscription. It shouldn’t require everyone in the group to download an app from the store. And it definitely shouldn’t hold basic features hostage until you pay up.
So I built one. Not as a startup, not as a side hustle — as a thing I needed, made the way I thought it should be made.
Why It’s Free (Really)
People hear “free, no catch” and immediately look for the catch. I get it. Here’s the honest answer: there’s no business model. BaatLo doesn’t make money. It’s funded by my own time and a modest hosting bill, and I’m comfortable with that because I built it for myself first and decided to share it.
Every feature is available to every user. No premium tier, no upgrade prompts, no limit on groups or members. I didn’t hold anything back because there was nothing to hold back — everything I built, I built because it was needed, and it felt wrong to then charge people for needing it.
Will it stay exactly like this forever? Mostly. At some point, I may introduce some ads to help cover the basic running costs — hosting, email delivery, the small infrastructure that keeps things working. But that would be the ceiling, not the beginning of a monetization strategy. The features stay free. The philosophy doesn’t change.
I think the best things in life shouldn’t come with a catch. When I build something, I want people to use it freely — not feel like they owe me for it.
The Decisions Behind the Design
Philosophy is easy to talk about. It means more when you can point to the specific choices it produced. Here are a few that shaped BaatLo.
Ghost Members exist because fairness means everyone. Not everyone in your group is going to sign up for a new tool. Maybe it’s your dad, maybe it’s a friend who joined the trip for one day. Ghost Members let you add people by name and track their share without forcing them to create an account. Nobody gets left out of a fair split just because they don’t do “apps.”
The settlement algorithm minimizes transactions, not just balances. When five people owe each other in different directions, the obvious approach is to have everyone pay everyone. BaatLo’s Settle All feature calculates the fewest payments needed to get everyone to zero. Less confusion, less back-and-forth, less “I sent it, did you check?”
It’s a PWA, not an app store download. BaatLo runs in your browser and can be added to your home screen like a native app — full screen, fast, no toolbar. I chose this deliberately because I didn’t want the first step of splitting a bill to be “go to the Play Store and download this.” Open a link, and you’re in. That’s it.
Privacy is structural, not cosmetic. There’s no tracking, no analytics following your spending patterns, no data sold to anyone. Your financial information stays between you and your group. I didn’t add privacy features to check a box — I built the whole thing without the tracking infrastructure in the first place. There’s nothing to opt out of because there was never anything to opt into.
Each of these decisions traces back to the same instinct: if something feels off, I’d rather rebuild it from scratch than learn to live with it. I lose sleep over things most people don’t notice — a flow that’s one tap too long, a friction point that shouldn’t exist. I’ve stopped apologizing for that. It’s how the good stuff gets made.
An Open Door
That’s the story. BaatLo was built by one person, for a real need, with a philosophy that fairness and simplicity shouldn’t cost anything. If that sounds like something you’d use — it’s here, it’s free, and it works.
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