Legal
Terms of Use
Effective
These are the terms for using Splitmate. “We” means Quizuncle, the indie studio behind it; “you” means whoever is using the app. They are short on purpose, and everything in them is something we actually intend to hold to.
1. Acceptance
By installing or using Splitmate you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the app.
You must be 18 or over to use Splitmate. It is not for children, it is not directed at them, and a person under 18 should not create a group, join one, or put their name, picture or messages into it. See the privacy policy.
2. What you may do
Splitmate is free of charge. We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use it on devices you control, for your own personal use. There is nothing to buy, nothing to unlock, and no code in the app that could take a payment for anything.
The app’s source code is private and is not licensed to you. Please do not redistribute the app, distribute modified builds of it, or reverse-engineer it, except to the extent the law gives you that right whatever this clause says.
3. Splitmate is a record, not a payment system
No money ever moves through Splitmate. The app records what the people in a group entered about what they spent, and what they entered about paying each other back. It does not move a single rupee, and it has no way to.
Settling up writes a row: who paid whom, how much, on what date, and which method was chosen. Cash, UPI and Other are the three method labels available on that row, and to the app all three mean exactly the same thing — a note describing a payment that already happened somewhere else, in cash, in your bank’s own app, or wherever you actually settled it.
To leave no room for a hopeful reading: Splitmate does not start a payment, does not check that a payment happened, does not hold your money, and does not guarantee that anybody will pay anybody. It is not a payment service, not a wallet, not an escrow arrangement and not a lender. It is not regulated as any of those things because it is none of them. There is no card on file, no bank connection, and no code in the app that could take or send money.
Pay via UPI does not change any of that: Splitmate still only records a payment, as a row like any other, and only when you say you made it. When you owe someone in a rupee group, it opens your own UPI app with their UPI ID and the amount filled in. The payment, if you make it, is made in that app, between you, your bank and theirs, and Splitmate is not told whether it happened. A UPI ID you save for someone is kept as a note on your phone, or in the browser where you have signed in with Google, for that and nothing else, and checking that it belongs to the right person is up to you.
Asking for money works the same way. Remind composes a message and hands it to your Android share sheet, so whether it is ever sent, and by which app, is entirely up to you. Send a nudge is the one thing Splitmate sends on your behalf: a notification to the person who owes you, naming you, the group and the amount, at most once per person per group per day. It is a reminder, not a demand, and it does not make anybody owe anything.
If a payment goes wrong — it never arrives, it arrives twice, it goes to the wrong person — that is between you, the person you paid, and whoever actually carried the payment. We are not a party to it and cannot reverse it, because we were never in it.
4. The numbers are arithmetic on what you typed
Balances, the amount each person owes, the settle-up suggestions and every total in the app are calculated from what the members of that group entered. If somebody typed the wrong amount, picked the wrong payer, split a bill the wrong way, or forgot to add an expense entirely, the numbers will be confidently wrong in exactly that way, and the app has no way of knowing.
Splitmate is a convenience for keeping track. It is not financial, tax, accounting or legal advice, and a figure it shows is not a statement of a debt that anyone has verified. A disagreement about who owes what is between the members of the group. Please check the numbers before you act on them.
5. An invite code is the key to the group
Anyone holding a group’s invite code can join that group, unless its link has passed its deadline, and read its whole history — every expense, every settlement, every member’s name and picture, every receipt photo and comment, the edit history, and the entire chat thread, including the messages sent before they arrived.
That is how joining works, and it is why sharing a group is as easy as showing someone a QR code across a table. It is also the whole of the security around a group, so treat a code the way you would treat a password: give it only to the people you actually want in the group, and share it in a way you are happy with.
The app cannot rotate a code, and it cannot withdraw one. There is no “generate a new code” button. What it does is put a deadline on the link: each time somebody taps Share invite link or Copy invite link in a current version of either client, or creates a group in the browser after signing in with Google, the code lets new people join for 30 days from then. A code that has never been shared or copied that way has no deadline until somebody does — for example, a group created on the phone and only shown as a QR code, or one shared before links had a deadline. A deadline never removes anybody who has already joined. If a code has gone somewhere you did not intend, email us — it is described on the data deletion page.
6. What you add is visible to the group
Everything you put into a group is shown to everyone else in it, and is stored on the server in a form we can read. That includes your display name, your profile picture, the description and note on every expense you add, the note on a settlement, every chat message you send, every comment you write, every receipt photo you attach, and a record of every change you make to an expense, a payment or the group’s settings. Every member of the group can see all of it. None of it is end-to-end encrypted; the privacy policy sets out exactly what is uploaded and who can read it.
Please do not put other people’s personal information into a group without their agreement. A group is a shared space, and once something is in it, it is in everyone’s copy. Do not use a group to store anything sensitive — identity numbers, card details, passwords, health information, or anything you would not be comfortable having sitting in an ordinary group chat. That goes for a receipt photo too, since every member of the group sees it: check what else is in the picture before you attach it.
Removing a member takes that person out of the balances and out of new splits. It does not reach their phone: the device they joined on keeps the copy of the group it already has, and their name and picture stay in the group’s records. The app has no button that ends somebody else’s membership on the server; only an email request to us does that.
7. Splitmate is still changing
Splitmate is distributed through Google Play, and it is a small app in active development. That has consequences you should know about before you rely on it:
- Features may change, behave differently between versions, or be removed. Nothing in the app is final.
- There may be defects, including ones that lose or mangle data. Do not use Splitmate as the only record of anything you cannot afford to get wrong.
- What was entered before the public release is real data and it carried forward. It was not wiped when Splitmate became public: the groups, expenses, messages and pictures added during testing are still there.
The web client at web.splitmate.quizuncle.com has your groups plus a view-only Me tab, and needs no install. Everything above applies to it just the same. Without a connection it still shows your groups, and new expenses or payments you add wait in that browser until it is back online; if that browser’s storage is cleared first, they are lost.
8. Acceptable use
Please do not use Splitmate to:
- harass, threaten, defame or impersonate anybody;
- share content that is unlawful where you are, or that infringes somebody else’s rights;
- put another person’s personal information into a group without their agreement;
- probe, overload or interfere with the service, or attempt to reach data belonging to groups you were not invited into.
Report and Block are real features, on both clients. You can report any message, and on the phone you can also report a group member from their profile. You can block someone from the message itself, in any chat — and Settings has a blocked-users list showing exactly who you have blocked, so you can undo it whenever you like. The browser client has the same two controls on a message, and its own Blocked people list in two places: at the top of each conversation, and in its Settings (the ⚙ on the Me tab), so undoing a block never means going looking for a thread that person is in.
We should be straight with you about what Block actually does, because the honest answer matters more than the reassuring one. From the moment you block someone, you stop seeing anything they send from then on and stop being notified about it — messages already in the chat stay where they are. Blocking does not stop them writing into a group chat you are both in. A group thread is a shared space whose rules decide who may read and write it, not who is willing to receive from whom, so there is no way for a block to take away their ability to post there — it only changes what reaches you. If you are protecting yourself from someone, treat Block as hiding them from your own device, never as a wall that keeps them from writing somewhere you both still are.
Reporting sends a copy of the message to us, not to the person you reported, and they are never told a report was filed. We review a filed report, and act on it where warranted, within 48 hours — a ceiling on how long a report can sit unread, not a promise of an instant or automated response, since this is one small studio reading reports by hand rather than a moderation team. Actioning a report clears the offending message’s text for everyone in the thread; it does not undo whatever already happened before it was reported.
We make no promise about how thoroughly we can investigate a dispute between members of a group, and we do not undertake to monitor what people write to each other before it is reported. If somebody is a danger to you, please contact the police rather than us.
9. No warranty
SPLITMATE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE APP WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE, THAT ANY DEFECT WILL BE CORRECTED, OR THAT ANY FIGURE IT CALCULATES IS ACCURATE.
In normal words: the expenses you log as Just me exist only on your phone unless you turn on the optional backup switch the privacy policy describes — it defaults to off, and we hold no copy of them until you turn it on yourself. Either way, keep your own record of anything you cannot afford to lose: a group’s second copy on the server, and the optional personal-ledger backup, are both synchronisation between whichever devices are in on it, not a backup service, and neither is a guarantee.
10. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, nor for lost data, lost money, lost profits or business interruption, arising out of or connected with your use of Splitmate. That includes any amount you did or did not pay somebody on the strength of a number this app showed you: the payment happened between the two of you, outside the app, and clause 3 explains why we are not in it.
Our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the amount you paid for the app, which is nothing. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.
11. Availability is best-effort
Group sync, chat and notifications all run on Google Firebase, and the app reaches your phone through Google Play. We do not control any of that. There is no service level agreement, no uptime guarantee, and no promise that any of these features will exist forever — we may change them, limit them, or withdraw them, and Google may change what it offers us underneath.
Where we reasonably can, we will give notice before withdrawing something rather than switching it off without warning. Your personal ledger keeps working regardless: it is stored on your own phone and does not depend on any of this.
Google Firebase and Google Play each operate under their own terms and privacy policies, which we neither control nor speak for. What data reaches them is set out in our privacy policy.
12. Termination
You can stop using Splitmate whenever you like: uninstall it, and, if you want your data taken off the server too, delete your account in the app — the fastest way to reach it yourself — or email us for whatever that cannot reach; both are described on the data deletion page. Uninstalling removes everything on the phone, including every Just-me expense, and removes nothing from the server on its own.
We may block an identity from the sync and chat services if it is being used to break these terms or the law. That does not take the app off your phone and does not touch the data stored on it.
13. Changes to these terms
When these terms change, the effective date at the top and bottom of this page moves. If a change materially affects your rights, we will say so here in words rather than only moving the date. Continuing to use the app after a change means you accept it.
What changed on this date. Sections 7 and 11 no longer describe a test release, because Splitmate is now publicly released on Google Play, and section 8 gives the browser’s Blocked people list its new place in Settings. No right you had under the previous version has been taken away.
14. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts of India have jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of Splitmate.
15. Contact
Questions about these terms go to splitmate@quizuncle.com. A real person reads it.
Effective . See also the privacy policy and how to delete your data.