OurTab vs Tricount
Free is the right price for a holiday.
Tricount is free, and that's not a catch
Tricount was bought by the Dutch bank bunq, and as at August 2026 it has no paid tier at all — the Premium subscription was discontinued rather than raised. If your question is "why would I pay for a ledger?", that's a fair question and Tricount is the reason you're asking it.
It's built around a tricount: a named pot of shared costs with a group of people in it. A weekend away, a stag do, a flat's bills for the month. You add expenses, it does the maths across currencies, everyone settles up, and the tricount is done.
A household is the one case that never closes
That model is a good fit for something with an end. Your kitchen doesn't have one. You will shop again on Thursday, and the week after, and the question isn't "what did the trip cost" but "are we roughly square, and what do we need to buy?"
Nothing in a splitter knows what's in your fridge, what's going off, what you could cook tonight, or whose turn it is. Those live in three other apps, and the shop gets typed into two of them.
Where it matters day to day
- One paste, four jobs. Paste your supermarket order into OurTab and it becomes an itemised expense, your inventory, your meal suggestions and the split — not a single line reading "Tesco £96".
- Paid vs consumed. OurTab records who paid and who the items were for separately, so the person who does the big shop doesn't quietly become the household's bank.
- Feature churn cuts both ways. Version 8.0 didn't unlock the old Premium features so much as drop them — exporting your data, sorting, and custom splits went with it, and their own help centre fielded people whose tricounts had gone missing after updating. Free is excellent until the free owner decides what free includes.
- You can always take your ledger with you. OurTab exports every expense and repayment as a spreadsheet, and the whole household's data as a file another program can read — free, from Settings, without asking us. How exporting works.
Where Tricount is the better pick
For a holiday with six friends in three currencies, Tricount is better than OurTab and it's free. It needs no account to get going, it's ad-free, and it converts currencies properly — OurTab is GBP only and assumes a household that lives together. If you want a splitter and nothing else, take the free one.
Details as at August 2026 — check Tricount's own site.