A bill splitter that keeps your data on your phone

Easy Bill Split is an iOS app for splitting a bill with friends: scan a receipt, add the items, and see who owes what. It is on the App Store now, with Android on the way. The part most apps in this category get wrong, and the part I cared about most, is that your bills never leave your phone.

I spend my working life helping companies measure what people do, so building a consumer app that deliberately measures almost nothing was a useful exercise in the opposite discipline. Here is what I built, and why the privacy choice was the whole point.

What it does

Splitting a bill is a small, annoying problem that every group of friends has. Easy Bill Split keeps it simple: start a bill, add people, scan the receipt or type the items, and the app works out the shares including tax and tip. No spreadsheet, no "I'll get you back later", no mental arithmetic at the table. You can try it at easybillsplit.ffgcvs.com.

The privacy decision

Here is the short version of the privacy policy: the app stores your bills on your device, not on a server. There is no account to create. I never see your name, your friends' names, the amounts on your bills, or who owes what.

That was a deliberate architecture, not an afterthought:

• On-device storage. Bills, items, people, prices, taxes, and tips live locally on your iPhone or iPad using Apple's SwiftData. Delete the app and the data is gone with it.
• No account. Nothing to sign up for means nothing to breach. The most private data is the data you never collect.
• Receipt photos are processed for text, never stored. The one image that leaves your phone, and only when you scan a receipt, is sent over an encrypted connection to extract its line items. The photo itself is never kept; only a hashed reference and the extracted text sit in a short-lived cache that clears within days. The full chain is in the privacy policy.
• Analytics you can switch off. The app collects anonymous usage and crash data to stay healthy, gated behind a consent prompt and a toggle in Settings.

Why an analytics person builds it this way

It sounds like a contradiction: a measurement specialist shipping an app that measures the bare minimum. It is not. Good measurement is about collecting the least data that answers your question, with clear consent, and treating everything else as a liability. A consumer app is just the cleanest place to prove that.

The same principles run straight into client work. The companies I help are under exactly this pressure: collect less, honour consent, and still measure enough to run the business. That is the heart of privacy and consent work and of first-party, server-side data collection, where you decide precisely what is collected and where it goes.

Shipping it end to end

I designed, built, and shipped Easy Bill Split on my own: the SwiftUI interface, the on-device data model, the receipt scanning, the consent flow, and the App Store release. I do that partly because I enjoy it, and partly because it keeps me honest about what it actually takes to put something into the world. When I tell a client a tracking change is "simple", I have shipped enough to know what simple really costs.

If you want the privacy-first thinking behind this app applied to your own measurement, that is the day job. Start with a free health check.