Frequently asked questions
Last updated: 21 May 2026
The most common questions about Bill-splitter, answered in more depth than fits on the landing page. If your question isn't covered, please get in touch.
Is Bill-splitter free?
Yes, completely free. There is no subscription, no signup, no app to download, and no premium tier. The running costs are covered by a single advertising slot on the landing page and the occasional voluntary donation. There is no point at which using the tool will ask for payment, an email address, or any account details.
Do I need to install an app to split a bill?
No. Bill-splitter runs entirely in any modern web browser on phone or laptop. The host opens the site, snaps a receipt, and shares a QR code; everyone else scans it on their phone, types their name, and joins the session instantly. Nothing needs installing on either side. The tool works in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge from roughly 2021 onwards.
Does my receipt photo get uploaded somewhere?
The photo itself never leaves your device. Optical character recognition runs entirely inside your browser using Tesseract.js, an open-source WebAssembly OCR engine. Only the structured result — the parsed items, quantities, prices, and total — is sent to our server, and only so that other people at the table can pick from the same list. The session and its data are deleted automatically 30 minutes after creation, or 5 minutes after everyone leaves, whichever comes first. The full breakdown lives in the privacy policy.
How many people can split the same bill?
Bill-splitter is optimised for typical restaurant table sizes of 2 to 10 people, which covers most groups in practice. Larger groups — up to a couple of dozen — still work technically, but the picking interface and the per-person totals panel are designed around the comfortable upper bound of a dinner table. If you regularly need to split bills across 20 or more participants, the user experience will be functional rather than delightful.
What happens if a receipt is hard to read?
Every parsed field shows a confidence indicator — green for high, amber for medium, red for low. Before the host shares the session, they can review the parsed receipt and tap any low-confidence field to correct it. The pipeline handles JPG, PNG, HEIC (iPhone Live Photos), and PDF receipts in multiple languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese. Crinkled thermal receipts and very glossy paper sometimes need a second shot in better light.
Does Bill-splitter handle tax and tip?
Yes, and it handles the regional differences automatically. For US and Canadian receipts, where sales tax is added on top of listed prices, tax is detected on the receipt and allocated proportionally to each person based on the items they claimed. For European, UK, Australian, and similar receipts where VAT or GST is already included in the listed prices, tax is not added again — splitting items already splits the included tax. Tip is auto-detected when present and allocated proportionally; the host can also correct or add a tip manually before sharing if the receipt printed without one. The full reasoning is covered in the bill-splitting guide.
Do I need an account to use Bill-splitter?
No. There are no user accounts at all — neither the host nor the participants need to sign up, sign in, or remember a password. We chose this deliberately so that splitting a bill is faster than the alternatives that require everyone to install an app and create a profile. The trade-off is that there is no history of past sessions; once a session ends, it is gone.
Can I see a record of past bills I split?
No, and this is intentional. Every session is deleted automatically 30 minutes after it is created, with no archive and no backup. If you need a record for accounting purposes, take a screenshot of the validation panel before everyone settles up. We hold receipt data only long enough to coordinate the splitting, and the lack of history is a privacy feature rather than a limitation.
What file formats does it accept for receipts?
JPG, PNG, HEIC, and PDF. HEIC support means iPhone receipts photographed in the default settings work without conversion. PDF support covers digital receipts from delivery apps and any restaurant that prints to PDF. The OCR pipeline handles multi-page PDFs by reading only the first page, which is where receipts typically live.
Is Bill-splitter safe to use in countries with strict privacy laws?
Yes. We are based in the European Union and built the service to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation by design. No personal data is required to use the tool, the receipt photo never leaves your device, and the parsed receipt data is deleted automatically within 30 minutes. We have no accounts, so there is no profile to subject-access, port, or delete on demand. The privacy policy documents the data flows in full.