

Show HN: Payback, a web app to make spending and borrowing money easier - andrewberls
http://payback.io/

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calinet6
Great idea, looks like, but I do hope you're aware there are many of these
around.

<http://www.buxfer.com/>

<http://www.splitwise.com/>

<https://wesplit.it/>

<http://www.billsarein.com/>

<https://www.paydivvy.com/>

<https://www.billmonk.com/>

<https://splitabill.com/>

<http://flatmin.com/>

<http://expensure.com/>

I personally use the first two, in my roommate / office situation
respectively. They work great, frankly. I have very few complaints about
either.

If you can do it better, more power to you, but as with any crowded space, I
have to ask, because I'm genuinely interested—why did you choose to start from
scratch?

~~~
andrewberls
Ha, I'm aware this is a well populated space! I made this mostly as a learning
experience for myself - I'm trying to improve my skills with Rails and I
wanted to make something useful for my apartment and this is the result! I'm
not trying to beat out any existing services by any means, just wanted to
share my take on it.

~~~
calinet6
Awesome, it's an excellent project to learn with. Simple data model, a clear
problem, easily solved by a web app, with a high requirement for usability and
simplicity. Glad to see your take on it too, keep it up!

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nikz
We have a similar app, Flatmin (<http://flatmin.com>) that's targeted more
specifically at shared living situations.

We built it a few years ago, and h(ave|ad) big plans to expand into household
chores and shopping lists. It's an interesting problem from a couple of
perspectives. We've found the more Facebook integration we can do, the better
as the target market are very comfortable with Facebook.

It's also a difficult one to make money from - we have some ads on there, but
I think to really make it work you'd need integration with another app or some
kind of freemium offering (daily deals?)

Yours looks nice - if I could make a suggestion, it would be great to enter
email addresses of people to invite, as sending them a hex string is less
common and more likely to get lost!

~~~
andrewberls
Very cool! Flatmin looks like an awesome service! Payback is definitely still
feature-minimal :p Everything you suggested is actually a major item on my to-
do list! Facebook integration has been brought up several times and I very
much agree about the hex string scheme - the next thing I'm going to do is
look into an invite by email/ join with referral link, etc. I have no
intention of trying to monetize either - I made it purely as a learning
experience for my own apartment, and it does seem like a difficult space to
get into.

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aaronpk
Great to see this packaged as a nice service for people!

I built something a lot like this in 2004 and used it with a household of 6-8
people for over 5 years with great success. We split rent, utilities and food
with it. I let a few other households use it as well, and everybody had a
great experience with it.

I've been surprised that nobody has come out with an easy to use service for
this, so I'm excited to check yours out!

My one suggestion is to give me a little more information about the service
before signing up. Screenshots would be great to see.

~~~
andrewberls
Is your version still available? I would love to check out your take on it! I
built this for the exact same reason - I'm in a shared apartment of 6, so I'm
hoping people in similar situations will be able to get some use out of it.

Good suggestion about screenshots - I'll put more up soon!

~~~
aaronpk
Back on my computer (commented from my phone earlier). I don't know if you
just added more screenshots already, or if you were just hiding from the
mobile view! They look good tho!

Unfortunately my old version is not generally available, but you can take a
look at a few screenshots! Feel free to leave comments with questions:
<http://flickr.com/gp/aaronpk/LAMz1d/>

~~~
andrewberls
Ah yeah, the screenshots that are on there are hidden from small views. I
really like your version, especially the graph idea - I would imagine there
are lots of possibilities for interesting visualizations!

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koenbok
I was looking for something like this to share our car costs. Unfortunately it
lacks some stuff I really need:

\- Exclude people from cost (only 4 of 5 people do the road trip)

\- Fully claim some cost (someone needs the car for a day to move some stuff
for himself)

Are there other apps like this with a nice iPhone client?

~~~
andrewberls
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're looking for, but you should be able to
do this already. For the first one, you can select specific group members (a
'group' expense is just the default) and then do the split option. For the
second, just select the user and the payback option!

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rschmukler
Check out my site: <http://goodmate.co>

We do similar things and you might find some inspiration or things you'd like
to build into yours. PS. I also did mine for getting familiar with some new
web techniques (Backbone + Rails in this case)

~~~
andrewberls
Goodmate looks fantastic! You definitely have a lot of features that I would
love to try and build into Payback. I'm actually thinking of doing my next
project in Backbone too - do you recommend any particular resources for
getting started?

~~~
rschmukler
Sorry for the delay, highly recommend using backbone-rails [1]. Reading the
docs for Backbone and then the source for the adapters in that gem was really
helpful. Ryan Bates also does a screen cast on it, but it costs money [2].
Nonetheless, his pro-line of casts are great if you can swing the $10/mo.

I also think backbone looks great in CoffeeScript, and since rails prefers it
anyway, I think it works out. Here's a good tutorial on that: [3]

[1] <https://github.com/codebrew/backbone-rails> [2]
<http://railscasts.com/episodes/323-backbone-on-rails-part-1> [3]
<http://adamjspooner.github.com/coffeescript-meet-backbonejs/>

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lukencode
I built a windows phone app around a similar concept
([http://www.windowsphone.com/en-
us/apps/7745a9a4-6926-4767-9e...](http://www.windowsphone.com/en-
us/apps/7745a9a4-6926-4767-9e61-837fdd1faba5)) but it hasnt really caught on.

~~~
andrewberls
I think the same can be said of windows phone :p In all seriousness, I love
the design of the app! I would definitely use it if I wasn't on Android. How
do you have 'taking' set up?

