Eider

I shipped Eider this summer: an expense splitter for the people you actually live and travel with. It's on the App Store, Google Play (open beta), and the web, built solo since April.

The part worth posting about is the feature I refused to build.

Every splitter I tried eventually made the money feel adversarial. Free tiers meter you, so you add a few expenses on a trip and then get an ad where the arithmetic should be. And the interfaces are built around suspicion: approve this, dispute that, reject the other. That's a debt-collection posture, pointed at people who are mostly just trying to remember who covered the cab.

So Eider records, it doesn't enforce. There is deliberately no way to reject, dispute, or counter what someone else added. Your roommate says they bought the paper towels, and Eider writes it down. If that's wrong, you're two people who can talk to each other, and no app arbitration was ever going to fix it.

Saying no to that whole category was the hardest constraint I held, and it's the one I'd defend longest. It also deleted a surprising amount of product: no pending-approval states, no edit-war resolution, no "someone disputed your expense" email. Every one of those is a screen I didn't have to design and a bug I don't have.

Two things changed under me along the way.

Pricing. The paid tier started as a per-nest upgrade and became a person-held membership, where one annual membership covers everyone in the nests you create. A six-person trip is one subscription instead of six.

The free tier. I kept looking for the polite place to cap it, because that's the obvious lever, and I never found one that didn't make the product worse. So adding an expense is never capped, delayed, or interrupted, and there's no limit on the people or expenses you track.

Revenue is $0. The paid tier isn't purchasable yet, on purpose. I want a real read on whether people invite each other before I put a price in front of that.

Happy to get into any of it. I'm especially curious whether the no-dispute stance reads as principled or as a missing feature. I've argued myself into both.