Self-hosted shared expenses
Dinner, rent, the trip nobody kept a spreadsheet for. Add what you spent and Balancia tells each person exactly where they stand — in the currency they paid in, on a server you control.
Free account, no card. Or clone the repository and run the whole thing yourself.
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Weekend in Lisbon
4 people · EUR
Paid by
Split
€84.60 ÷ 4 is €21.15 each, exactly.
Where everyone stands
€596.00 spent
Sam
paid €84.60
€64.40
owes
Mina
paid €420.00
€271.00
gets back
Théo
paid €28.00
€121.00
owes
Ada
paid €63.40
€85.60
owes
Settled in 3 payments
What it does
Equal, exact, percentage or share-based. Amounts are whole minor units, so allocations sum to the total exactly — every time.
When two people cover one bill, record it once. Balances follow who actually paid what.
Keep each currency balanced separately, or convert everything into one base currency at a rate frozen when you record it.
Sign in with a passkey or a password. Invite people who do not want an account through a revocable link.
Attach photos or PDFs. They live in your own storage, behind authorization — never in a public folder.
Rent, subscriptions, the shared internet bill. Generated on schedule in your group's own timezone.
Add income — a deposit returned, a refund, a shared payout — and split it the same four ways, on a schedule if it repeats. Repayments are recorded as settlements, and the group's suggested payments are worked out for you.
Who it's for
Six situations people tend to arrive with. Each one leans on a different part of Balancia.
Flights booked months ago, a villa deposit one person fronted, dinners paid by whoever's card was closest, half of it in another currency. Add each cost as it happens and Balancia keeps every currency straight, then suggests the payments that clear the whole trip when you get home.
Rent, electricity, internet and the weekly shop, month after month. Set the repeating ones up once and they appear on schedule. When somebody moves out mid-month, an exact-amount split handles the awkward part.
Two incomes that aren't the same size, and a fifty-fifty split that never felt right. Give the shared pot a percentage or a share ratio instead — 60/40, or three shares to two — and every expense follows it without a conversation each time.
One or two people carry the big bookings while a dozen others owe a share. Guests join the group through a link, so nobody has to make an account for a single weekend — and when the venue returns the deposit, that comes back in as income and reduces what everyone owes.
A car between siblings, a boat between friends, a holiday house in the family. Insurance and maintenance recur; when you rent the place out, that revenue is recorded and split the same way the costs are. Receipts stay attached to the expense they belong to.
Kit and pitch fees going out, subs and gig money coming in. Record both sides in one group, split payouts by shares when they aren't equal, and export the year as an Excel workbook for whoever keeps the books.
Coming from Splitwise
Upload a Splitwise CSV export or JSON backup and Balancia shows you exactly what it will create before writing anything. Run the same file twice and nothing is duplicated. You do not have to start from an empty group.
What you're used to
Your history sits on a company's servers.With Balancia
It sits on a server you or someone you trust runs.What you're used to
Useful features drift behind an upgrade.With Balancia
Every feature is in the repository, under AGPL-3.0.What you're used to
Everyone has to sign up before they can be in a group.With Balancia
Guests join through a link you can revoke.What you're used to
Getting your data out is an afterthought.With Balancia
Any group downloads as JSON, CSV or Excel.Your instance, your data
Balancia is free software under the AGPL-3.0-or-later licence. It runs from one Docker Compose file with PostgreSQL and a background worker, and requires no third-party services. Telemetry never includes personal data or amounts. On this instance, an administrator has enabled anonymous counts for the public landing and sign-in screens; no page inside the application is counted.
Leaving is as easy as arriving: every group exports to CSV, Excel or JSON from its settings, and a self-hosted instance keeps its database and receipts on disks you own.
The whole installation
curl -fsSLO https://github.com/sebitr/balancia/releases/latest/download/bootstrap.shFetches the one file that installs Balancia.
sh bootstrap.shSets it up, asks what to enable, and starts everything.
The AGPL adds one obligation: run a modified version as a network service and you must offer its users the source. That protects the people trusting your instance with their financial history.
Where it stands
Everything on this page exists in the repository today. What is finished, what is partial and what has not been started is written down rather than implied — including the parts that are not built yet.
Read the implementation statusQuestions
Yes. An account on this instance costs nothing and no feature is held back. The software itself is free under AGPL-3.0-or-later, so you can also run your own copy and never depend on this one.
No. Invite them through a revocable link. Guests can view the group, add and edit expenses, settle up and upload receipts, but never manage people, links or the group itself.
Any group downloads as JSON — the complete record, amounts exactly as stored — or as CSV or an Excel workbook, from its settings page.
Keep each currency balanced on its own, or convert into one base currency at a rate frozen when the expense is recorded, so historical expenses are never silently recalculated. Daily rates can be filled in from the European Central Bank's published figures; that is off by default.
No. Telemetry never carries personal data or amounts — it exists only to help improve the tool, and on a self-hosted instance it is off by default. Even the category guessing runs locally, with no AI service involved. Optional integrations only make network requests when an administrator enables them.
Three commands: clone the repository, run the bootstrap script, then bring it up with Docker Compose. PostgreSQL, migrations, the app and its worker all start together. Reverse-proxy examples for Caddy, Traefik and nginx are in the docs.
A group takes a minute to set up, and the people in it do not need accounts.
Rather build than sign up? Issues and pull requests are welcome.
Contribute on GitHub