Popolama — New Service for Tracking Shared Expenses in Travel and Groups

A team of six people preparing for a joint trip to Japan has brought to release the service Popolama — an application for tracking shared expenses that automatically calculates who owes whom after the trip or a trip to a bar.

Why splitting expenses equally is not always fair

When planning a group trip, the first priorities are usually tickets, accommodation, and the route. But, based on the project authors' experience, already during the trip and especially after its completion, another question arises — who owes whom and how much. Formally, in 2024–2025, this task seems long solved: the market for shared spending apps has existed for more than a year. But in practice, splitting expenses equally is often unfair: one person pays for the hotel, another pays for a taxi, a third constantly covers the bar bill, even though they only ordered a salad. The final amount is divided equally among everyone, and the person who spent less actually overpays for the rest.

• The idea of a fair, not just equal, division of expenses was discussed by the team long ago
• A catalyst for the launch was a joint trip for six to Japan
• The service is available on the website popolama.com

How the Popolama service works

The authors describe Popolama as a "service about people and money." Group participants enter data about who spent how much on common needs — from housing rental and transport tickets to restaurant bills — and the service recalculates the final balance and shows who needs to transfer how much to settle all debts within the company. This approach solves the main problem of leveling: it doesn't punish those who spent less, and it doesn't allow one participant to quietly pay for everyone else throughout the entire trip and then demand compensation after the fact.

Who is already solving this problem

The market for group expense trackers is far from empty: abroad for more than ten years there have been services like Splitwise and Settle Up, and there are local analogs for tracking shared family or friends' budgets. Nevertheless, the authors of Popolama, apparently, thought that existing solutions were not convenient enough for their particular scenario — spontaneous and heterogeneous spending by a large group during a trip, where expenses occur every hour and in different currencies — and decided to make their own tool, based on concrete uncomfortable experience rather than an abstract task.

Not just travel

Although the catalyst for the launch was a trip to Japan, the problem that Popolama solves is broader than one trip. Shared expenses in one form or another arise among roommates in a rented apartment, among a group that chips in for a gift, or among a family that keeps a common budget for household needs. The same mechanism works everywhere: someone pays first, and the rest then need to return their share, and the more participants and expenses there are, the harder it is to keep track of who has already settled up and who hasn't.

What this means

Popolama is a typical example of a product born from personal pain: there is a ready market of expense trackers, but a specific uncomfortable experience on a trip was enough reason for a small team to write and release their own service, rather than adapt to existing alternatives.