Show HN: Payback, a web app to make spending and borrowing money easier

Show HN: Payback, a web app to make spending and borrowing money easier(payback.io)

15 points by andrewberls 13 years ago | 16 comments

calinet6 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

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!

nikz 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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.

aaronpk 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

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/

koenbok 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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!

rschmukler 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

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/

lukencode 13 years ago |

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

andrewberls 13 years ago | |

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?