Which Expense Apps Let People Join Without an Account

Ask which expense apps work without a signup and every list gives the same answer: a tick in a column. That tick hides the only question that actually matters when you are organising a shared cost — who has to sign up. In some apps nobody does. In others only the organiser does, and everyone else is a name. In one, everybody does, and the people who don't are invisible to themselves. Those are three different products, and the table above separates them.

"No signup" means three different things

Sort the apps by who holds an account and the market splits cleanly:

1. Nobody has an account. Kittysplit ("No, you don't need to register, you can create Kitties and invite friends without an account"), Splid ("there's no sign-up required"), Spliit ("No account. No limitation.") and Tricount all work this way. The link or the code is the only key that exists.
2. Only the organiser has an account. Dolio and Settle Up: one person signs in and is responsible for the group, while the others take part as named participants. In Dolio these are ghost participants — full members of every split with no account, no email and no phone number.
3. Everybody has an account. Splitwise's own getting-started article opens with "Sign up for an account", and its knowledge base is explicit that you cannot join a group on your own — a current member has to invite you, and the invite link asks you to log in. A placeholder friend can be tracked by name, but cannot see their own balance until they get contact details attached and register.

The distinction is not academic. If the person who refuses to sign up is your father-in-law, model 2 solves your problem and model 1 solves it more thoroughly. If the person who refuses to sign up is you, only model 1 will do.

What the share link actually grants

In an app with no accounts, the link is the password — and most apps say very little about that. Tricount is the exception, and its terms are worth reading before you paste anything into a group chat.

Accounts can be shared between friends via a sharing link. This link gives read and write access to the Account. This link is unique and cannot be changed. […] It is not impossible for a stranger to gain access to it: it can be intercepted by a hacker, recovered from the memory of a computer or simply copied in the history.

— Tricount terms and conditions, retrieved 12 August 2026

"Cannot be changed" is the part to sit with: there is no rotating the link if it leaks. Kittysplit works the same way — "Each Kitty has its own special and secret link. People need this link to access the Kitty" — and its App Store listing is clear that holders can "participate add their own expenses", not merely look. Splid shares a group with a code, nine characters since version 1.8.1. None of the three documents a view-only mode.

Settle Up is the outlier. Its public API documentation lists per-user permission levels — "30=owner, 20=read/write, 10=read-only" — and a group's invite link carries an active flag, so it can be switched off. That is the only graded access model among the apps compared here, and it is a genuine advantage over every account-free option.

What you give up when nobody has an account

Accounts are friction, but they are also the mechanism that gets your data back. Remove them and three things change, all of them documented by the vendors themselves.

First, losing the link can mean losing the split. Kittysplit added optional accounts for exactly this reason — they let you "see all your Kitties in one place across devices" — and its help page recommends supplying an email when you create an event, "This way we can send you the link". An app that has to email you your own data is telling you where the fragility is.

Second, unused groups do not last forever. Tricount's terms state that an account not present in any user profile and not accessed for at least 24 months "will be made unavailable", then "completely removed at any moment within the next 12 months". For a holiday you might want to look up in three years, that is a real constraint.

Third, offline can mean one phone. Splid offers a genuine choice here — "Create an offline group and get settling up under control within seconds. Or, activate the sync to enter expenses together" — which is the strongest privacy story on this page and, in the offline case, the weakest recovery story.

How to choose: one dinner, one trip, one flatshare

Match the account model to how long the record has to survive, not to how much you dislike signing up.

• One dinner, settled the same evening. Nothing needs to survive, so friction is the only cost that counts. Kittysplit in a browser or Splid on a phone — nobody registers, and it does not matter if the link is gone next week.
• One trip, settled at the end. The record has to live a fortnight and stay correct across several people adding expenses. An account-free app is still fine, but somebody should be the custodian of the link — and if one traveller will never install anything, an app with named non-account participants keeps them in the maths instead of out of it.
• One flatshare, running indefinitely. Rent and bills recur, people move in and out, and the history matters a year later. This is where accounts earn their friction: an app tied to a login survives a lost phone, a cleared browser and a housemate who leaves.

How Dolio handles it

Dolio is our app, so here is the honest version, including the row where we lose. Creating a group requires an account — you sign in with Google, Apple, or an email and password. There is no way to start a Dolio group anonymously, and if that is your requirement, one of the account-free apps above is the better answer.

What Dolio does remove is the part organisers actually get stuck on: everyone else. A ghost participant is added by typing a name. They pay for things, owe money, appear in the settlement list, and are treated as a full member by the maths — with no account, no email and no phone number. They can claim their history later by signing in, or stay anonymous forever. So the practical answer to "do I have to make everyone sign up?" is no, and the answer to "does anyone?" is yes — one person.

The invite link is deliberately narrower than the links described above. Opened signed out, it shows the group name, how many members it has and the currency — no expenses, no balances, no member names — and it can be revoked from group settings. Reading a group's expenses or balances always requires being a signed-in member of that group; Dolio has no read-only or public share link at all. That is a real limitation compared with Settle Up's read-only permission level, and it is the trade we chose: no URL in circulation can expose a group's numbers.