Popolama: a new service for tracking shared expenses on trips and among friends

A group of six people preparing for a trip to Japan has shipped Popolama, an app for tracking shared expenses that automatically works out who owes whom after a trip or a night at the bar.

Why splitting costs equally isn't always fair

When planning a group trip, tickets, accommodation and the itinerary usually come first. But in the project creators' experience, another question comes up during the trip and especially after it ends: who owes whom, and how much. On paper, this problem looked long solved by 2024–2025, since apps for shared expenses have been around for years. In practice, though, splitting costs equally is often unfair. One person pays for the hotel, another covers taxis, and a third keeps picking up the bar tab despite ordering only a salad. The total gets divided evenly, and whoever spent less ends up subsidizing everyone else.

• The team had long discussed the idea of splitting expenses fairly rather than just equally
• A six-person trip to Japan pushed them to launch
• The service is available at popolama.com

How Popolama works

The creators describe Popolama as "a service about people and money." Group members log who spent how much on shared costs, from accommodation and transport tickets to restaurant bills. The service then recalculates the final balance and shows who needs to transfer how much to whom to settle all debts within the group. This approach fixes the main problem with equal splits: it doesn't penalize people who spent less, and it doesn't let one person quietly pay for everyone throughout the trip and then demand reimbursement after the fact.

Who already solves this problem

The market for group expense trackers is far from empty. Services like Splitwise and Settle Up have existed abroad for more than ten years, and there are local alternatives for tracking a family's or a group of friends' shared budget. Still, the Popolama team apparently found existing tools not convenient enough for their specific scenario: spontaneous, varied spending by a large group while traveling, with expenses happening every hour and in different currencies. So they decided to build their own tool, starting from a concrete frustrating experience rather than an abstract problem.

Not just for travel

Although the trip to Japan triggered the launch, the problem Popolama addresses goes beyond a single trip. Shared expenses come up in one form or another for roommates in a rented apartment, friends chipping in for a gift, or a family running a joint household budget. The same mechanism applies everywhere: someone pays first, and the others have to pay back their share later. The more people and expenses involved, the harder it is to keep track of who has already settled up and who hasn't.

What it means

Popolama is a typical product born from personal pain. There are plenty of expense trackers on the market, but one frustrating trip was reason enough for a small team to build and release its own service instead of adapting to existing alternatives.