Split a restaurant bill from one receipt photo

A four-person dinner, step by step

A typical Friday night: four people, one shared starter, four different mains, two glasses of wine for one person, a dessert two of you decided to split. The bill arrives, the table groans, the napkin maths begins.

With bill-splitter, the routine becomes: the person holding the receipt takes a photo on their phone. The OCR reads every line in a few seconds — vendor, items, prices, tax, total. They tap Share with friends and a QR code appears.

Everyone else points their camera at the QR. Their browser opens to the same session. They type a first name, hit join, and see the bill on their screen. Each person taps the items they had. The wine drinker claims both glasses. The two who shared a starter both tap it — bill-splitter halves the price. The dessert sharers do the same.

Every phone shows the same running per-person total. When every item is claimed and the totals match the printed bill within a cent, a green check appears. Done. No spreadsheet, no group chat screenshots, no waiting on the slowest person at the table.

Tax, tip, and shared items

A few details matter when the bill has more than just food.

Tax appears as its own line on most receipts. Bill-splitter detects it and splits it across users in proportion to what each person ordered. Someone who had the steak pays more of the tax than someone who had a side salad — because the tax was calculated that way to begin with.

Tip works the same way. If the receipt already includes a service charge, it's distributed proportionally. If the table wants to add a tip, the host can edit the tip line before sharing the session and bill-splitter folds it into the same split. Nobody has to remember whose share the round number includes.

Shared items — a bottle of wine for three, a platter of appetisers, a dessert two people split — work by tapping the same line from multiple phones. Two users on one item pay half each; three users pay a third each. There's no separate "split this" button; it's just how multiple claims on the same item work.

When bill-splitter beats the alternatives

Splitting evenly. Quick when everyone ordered roughly the same thing, unfair the moment one person ordered the cheapest pasta and another ordered the lobster. Most groups default to even-split because itemising is tedious — bill-splitter removes the tedious part.

One person pays, requests money back. A common pattern with Venmo, Revolut, or PayPal. Works fine for two people. With four or more it turns into nagging follow-ups for weeks. Bill-splitter settles the maths at the table; the payment app still handles the actual transfer, but everyone leaves dinner already knowing what they owe.

Splitwise and similar expense trackers. Excellent for ongoing shared expenses among roommates or travel groups. Overkill for a single restaurant bill — you need everyone on the same app, with an account, and the patience to type every line. Bill-splitter targets the single-bill case specifically; for recurring shared expenses, a dedicated tracker is still the right tool.

Spreadsheets and napkin maths. Slow, error-prone, and dependent on one person at the table being willing to do them. "I'll figure it out and let you know" usually means "I'll remember to nag you about this tomorrow."

What happens to your receipt

The honest version of the privacy story, with no marketing varnish:

The photo never leaves your device. Every receipt-reading library has a choice — process the image on a server or in the user's browser. We process it in the browser using Tesseract.js, an open-source OCR engine that runs entirely in your phone's WebAssembly runtime. The photo, the raw text, and your phone's EXIF metadata never reach us, because we never open a network connection that could carry them.

The parsed receipt reaches our server, briefly. Once everyone needs to see the same list of items, the parsed Receipt (item names, prices, total, vendor name) is uploaded to a single small server. It's stored as a JSON file with an unguessable ID — the kind of token that would take a computer many billion years to brute-force.

Then it deletes itself. Thirty minutes after the session is created, or five minutes after everyone has left, the file is gone. There is no backup, no archive, no off-site copy. Server logs record only the session ID and request counts — never an item name or a vendor. If a request like "let me look up a receipt I split last week" ever made sense, we'd have to say no — not because we wouldn't help, but because we don't have the data to look at.

Quick answers

Do I need to install anything? No. Bill-splitter runs in any modern browser — Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge. The scanner and everyone joining the session all work from a regular browser tab. There is no app to download.

What kinds of receipts work? Photos (JPG, PNG, HEIC from iPhones) and PDFs. Glossy thermal receipts work best photographed flat, with even light, from directly above. Crumpled or shadowy receipts still parse, but the OCR may need a couple of fields corrected by hand.

Can someone join who wasn't at the dinner? Anyone with the QR code or link can join — there's no allowlist. In practice, the session is shared verbally at the table and expires in thirty minutes, so the realistic risk is low. The host can also clear the session at any time, which evicts everyone instantly.

What if the OCR gets a price wrong? Every parsed field is editable. Confidence indicators highlight values the OCR was uncertain about so you can spot the ones worth double-checking. Edits made by the host before sharing apply to the session; once shared, the items are fixed for that round.

Does it work for non-restaurant bills? It works for any structured receipt — grocery shopping, hotel room service, supermarket runs split among housemates. The parser is tuned for restaurant formats but handles most printed receipts. PDFs from delivery apps work especially well.

Is this really free? Yes. The site runs a single advertising slot on the landing page (not during the splitting flow) and an optional donation prompt the host sees once after the bill settles. We don't have user accounts to monetise, and the architecture doesn't keep any data we could sell.