For investors
Most people who share costs don't share incomes.
Every expense-splitting app on the market inherits one assumption from the group trip it was designed for: that the split is a decision you make expense by expense, with even as the default. For the households actually using these tools, cohabiting partners and unmarried couples and roommates and family members carrying different incomes under one roof, that default is wrong on the first transaction, and re-deciding it on every one after that never stops.
Have Another Cherry treats the split ratio as the product. You set a percentage once, and every shared expense divides that way forever. It's a small change in the data model and a large change in whether the software matches the life it's describing.
Situated Strategies LLC · Have Another Cherry · olivia@situatedstrategies.org · PO Box 3766, Albany, NY 12208
The reality
This is not a niche. It's the default household.
Four findings define the opportunity. Each is drawn from public research, cited in full below.
Read together, those four numbers describe one household. It shares a permanent set of costs. It does not share a wallet. Its incomes are unequal. And it would rather not discuss any of it. That household is not an edge case the category forgot. It is the modal household, and no one has built the primitive it needs.
Why it matters
Shared-money software isn't a convenience category. It's a conflict category.
The research literature is unusually direct about the stakes. Using longitudinal data on 4,574 couples, Dew, Britt and Huston found that financial disagreements were the strongest disagreement type predicting divorce, stronger than disagreements over children, chores, or in-laws, and that they fully mediated the link between a perception of financial inequity and the hazard of divorce.[5] The operative variable is not how much money a couple has. It is whether the arrangement feels fair, and whether the argument keeps recurring.
That finding has a hopeful counterpart. Olson, Rick, Small and Finkel ran a two-year randomized longitudinal experiment on 230 engaged and newlywed couples, assigning some to merge money in a joint account. Couples in separate-account and no-intervention conditions showed the normal decline in relationship quality over the first two years of marriage. Couples assigned to a joint account did not.[6] The structure of the money arrangement caused a difference in the relationship.
This is the thesis in one sentence: how shared money is organized changes how people treat each other, which means the tool that organizes it is an intervention, not a spreadsheet.
A joint account is not available to everyone, and not wanted by everyone. Cohabiting couples pool far less than married ones, and the research attributes that to real, rational factors. Dual earning, shorter union duration, no joint children, uncertainty about the relationship's future.[7] Roommates and family members obviously aren't merging accounts at all. What all of them need is the thing a joint account provides socially: a standing, agreed, unspoken-but-settled rule about who carries what, without merging the money itself.
That's what a persistent split ratio is. It's the smallest possible version of a shared financial agreement.
And it has to be automatic, because the alternative is talking about it. Money is measurably the hardest subject to raise: in a field experiment with 755 employees, Cullen and Perez-Truglia found people are both unwilling to reveal their own pay and reluctant to ask about anyone else's.[8] Recent consumer research finds that financial stress itself shapes, and suppresses, how couples communicate about money, exactly when communication would help most.[9] And the sociology of money has held for thirty years that people do not treat money as fungible; they earmark it with social meaning, which is why "you owe me" is never only an arithmetic statement.[10]
The product implication. Every prompt to renegotiate the split is a prompt to have the conversation people are documented to avoid. So the ratio gets set once, at setup, when the conversation is cheapest. After that the software never asks again. Fairness becomes infrastructure instead of a recurring negotiation.
Competitive position
Splitwise, Honeydue, and the gap between them
The two best-known products in adjacent categories are both well built. Neither is built around the ratio, because neither was designed for this unit.
Splitwise is a group ledger. Its primitive is the transaction inside a group, and its centre of gravity is the trip. A temporary set of people, a division, and a settlement at the end. It's excellent at that, and it supports percentage, share and exact-amount splits. But the split is chosen per expense rather than held as a standing property of the household, and like every major splitter it keeps balance-forward books: expenses and payments net into one running number, so the record of which expenses a payment actually cleared has nowhere to live. Its debt-simplification setting goes further and reassigns who owes whom. Receipt scanning, itemization, expense search, saved default splits and an ad-free, uncapped experience all live in the paid tier, and the free tier is where most households would sit.
Honeydue is a couples' visibility layer. Its primitive is the bank account: link your institutions, choose what your partner can see, set budgets, get bill reminders, chat in-app. It's genuinely couples-first, which is rarer than it should be. But it's a mirror rather than an engine. It shows you balances and budgets; it doesn't hold a fairness rule and settle against it. It also asks for bank credentials up front, which is the single largest trust ask in consumer finance and a hard first step for a household that has not yet agreed on how it splits anything.
Have Another Cherry keeps open-item books. Every settlement is bound to the specific expenses it cleared: nothing is netted into an aggregate, nothing is reassigned, and when someone pays you back you can see exactly which items that payment covered. That is an accounting-model choice, not a feature toggle, and a competitor cannot adopt it without rewriting their core. On top of that model sits the ratio as the primitive: one agreement, set at setup, applied by default to every shared expense, for a group that is permanent rather than temporary. No bank linking is required to get value on day one.
| Splitwise | Honeydue | Have Another Cherry | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core primitive | The transaction, inside a group | The linked bank account | The split ratio between members |
| Settlement record | A running net balance goes down | Not a settlement ledger | Each payment stays bound to the expenses it cleared |
| Debt simplification | Offered as a setting; reassigns who owes whom | Not applicable | None. Balances stay between the people who incurred them |
| Free plan | Ad-supported with expense caps; unlimited expenses, expense search, saved default splits and the ad-free experience are paid | Free | No cap, no ads in the ledger, no credit card; expense search and saved default splits included free |
| Receipt capture | Scanning and itemization sit in the paid tier | Not the focus | AI scanning and line-item itemization, free for everyone, no quota |
| Percentage splits | Yes: percentage, shares, exact amounts, chosen per expense. Saving a default split is a paid feature | Not the model. Shows accounts, not shares | A customizable default split, free: percentages or exact amounts, changeable any time, and extra splitters can join a single expense |
| Designed for | Trips and temporary groups | Couples merging financial visibility | Standing households: partners, roommates, family |
| Bank credentials required | No | Yes, for core value | No |
| Relationship layer | None. It's a ledger | In-app chat | A financial-profile quiz free for everyone, insights on Premium |
| Early access to new features | In the paid tier | Not advertised | Included for everyone, free or paid |
| Maturity | Large user base, years of polish | Established couples app | New, small, still growing |
Compared against each product's free tier and publicly documented behaviour as of August 2026.
Why us
A conversation analyst who spent twelve years in restaurants
Olivia Mata is the founder of Situated Strategies LLC and the creator of Have Another Cherry. It's an unusual pairing of backgrounds for a fintech founder, and it's the reason the product is shaped the way it is.
She is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication at the University at Albany, SUNY, working with Dr. Alan Zemel in ethnomethodologically-informed conversation analysis, the empirical study of how people produce and repair understanding in ordinary talk, worked out from recordings of real interaction rather than from surveys or self-report. Her dissertation, Grouping Up: The Achievement of Collectivity in and as the Achievement of Instruction, asks how a collection of individuals becomes a group in the first place, and how instruction is the mechanism that does it.
That research is not decoration on the pitch. It is the product thesis. A shared-expense app is a group-formation problem wearing a ledger's clothes. Shared money breaks down exactly where the talk breaks down. The purchase nobody flagged, the resentment nobody named, the running tally nobody wants to be the one to raise. The literature cited above says the same thing from the outside: financial disagreement is the disagreement that ends marriages, the structure of the arrangement causally changes the relationship, and nobody wants to open the conversation. Have Another Cherry is being built by someone whose actual field is the mechanics of how those conversations succeed or fail.
It is also why Premium is heading where it is: a planned-expense preview that shows the projected split before the purchase, paired with AI-generated conversation starters for the discussion that purchase would otherwise trigger afterward, as an argument. Most money software moves the conversation later, to the statement, the reconciliation, the settle-up. This moves it earlier, to the point where it is still cheap to have.
Research & teaching
Ph.D. candidate in Communication, University at Albany, SUNY. Ethnomethodologically-informed conversation analysis, with Dr. Alan Zemel. M.A. 2020 and B.A. 2018 in Communication from the same institution. Instructor of record for Public Speaking and Introduction to Interpersonal Communication.
Published & presented
Published in the American Journal of Health Promotion and in a SUNY Press volume on COVID-19 disparities in New York's Capital Region. Presented at the 2024 International Institute for Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology in Seoul, and at the International Communication Association. Best Poster Award and Outstanding Paper Award.
Operating background
Twelve years in the restaurant industry, the last of them implementing the software that runs it. Most recently rolling out Square for Restaurants across six locations, through discovery, configuration, data reconciliation, QA sign-off and staff training.
That operating half matters as much as the research. Shipping software into a restaurant means non-technical staff have to succeed on the first attempt, under service pressure, with no training budget and no patience for a second try. It is an unforgiving standard for onboarding, and it is the standard this product is held to.
Have Another Cherry began at her own kitchen table. She and her partner Robert use it daily, specifying and testing features against their own finances. It was designed for one real relationship before it was designed for a market. What turned a personal fix into a company was listening to friends over the summer describe the identical failure in Splitwise: an income differential the tool simply refuses to model.
She scoped, designed and built the first working version herself with AI-assisted development, then brought on Matt Powers of Embr Intelligence on contract in August 2026 to harden the backend and ship production receipt scanning. The app runs on Firebase and is live. Situated Strategies' second product, the Making Moves Kitchen Kit, launches this quarter.
Business model
Free where it builds the habit, paid where it adds understanding
Freemium, per user
Premium is $3.99/month, $29.99/year or $99.99 once for lifetime access, billed per user. The free tier carries unlimited expenses, AI receipt scanning, the financial-profile quiz, no ads and no daily caps. The whole splitting engine plus the assessment, permanently.
Why give scanning away
Scanning is the habit-former: it's the feature that gets an expense logged in five seconds instead of not at all. Gating it suppresses the logging behaviour the entire product depends on. It's an acquisition cost, and it's the clearest wedge against a paid-tier incumbent.
What Premium is for
Understanding and automation, never access to the basics. Shipping today: insights and monthly trends, budget and expense planning, recurring expenses, backups and export, payment-mismatch detection. The financial-profile quiz is free for everyone. Next: the planned-expense preview and conversation starters described above.
The honest cost note: free AI receipt scanning is a real per-scan inference cost against a free user. It is defensible as customer acquisition, and it needs to be watched as a unit-economics line rather than assumed away. We track cost per scan and scans per converting user.
Traction
Where we are
Have Another Cherry is live and growing. The free tier is complete: unlimited expenses, AI receipt scanning, the financial-profile quiz, no ads in the ledger. With the product live, we're now starting to market it in earnest to build the user base: paid search and social pointing straight at the app, with this site as the front door.
We measure what the thesis says matters: households created, how many of them log expenses in a given week, and whether a sign-up turns into real shared expenses within its first seven days. Sign-up counts alone aren't the metric. We'd rather report a small true number than a vague large one, and we'll publish figures when they're worth diligencing.
Whether and when we raise follows the product. This page exists so the right people can follow along: if the thesis resonates, we'd rather show you the product now and share the numbers as they come in.
What would have to be true
The four things we'd diligence if we were you
Stated plainly, because a page that only argues one side is less useful than one that doesn't.
Incumbent gravity
Splitwise has a decade of habit and social network effects. The app your friends already have is the app you use. Our answer is that the household is a two-to-four-person network, not a social graph, which makes switching a conversation between people who already live together.
Willingness to pay
Consumer finance utilities have thin conversion. We're betting that insight and automation convert where basic access does not, and that a free tier without ads or caps builds enough trust to make the ask credible. This is the number to watch first.
Engagement cadence
Settling up is monthly, not daily. Receipt scanning and recurring expenses exist partly to create a weekly reason to open the app; if that doesn't hold, retention is the constraint.
Team size
A solo founder plus a contract developer, alongside a dissertation. That has still produced a shipped, live product with a working AI pipeline and a billing model, which is the relevant evidence, but it is a real constraint on speed, and it is the clearest thing capital would relieve.
We'd rather show you the product than the deck
The app is live with the free tier complete. Sign up and try it, because the fastest way to evaluate this is to set up a household and split something real.
References
Sources
Every figure above is linked to its source. Peer-reviewed work is cited with journal and volume; survey data is cited with its publisher and wave.
- Pew Research Center. In a Growing Share of U.S. Marriages, Husbands and Wives Earn About the Same. April 13, 2023. Finds 29% of marriages are ones in which both spouses earn about the same, up from 11% in 1972; the husband is the primary or sole breadwinner in 55%, and the wife in 16%. pewresearch.org
- Pepin, J. R. (2022). A Visualization of U.S. Couples' Money Arrangements. Socius, vol. 8. Using the National Couples' Health and Time Study (n = 3,396; 2020-21), reports that 66% of married different-gender couples pool all their income compared with 23% of cohabiting couples. doi.org/10.1177/23780231221138719
- Pew Research Center. More U.S. adults now share their living space, driven in part by parents living with their adult children. January 31, 2018 (analysing 2017 data). Reports 78.7 million adults, 31.9% of the adult population, living in a shared household, up from 28.8% in 1995. pewresearch.org
- Bankrate. Financial Infidelity Survey, February 2026 wave. Reports that 45% of Americans in committed relationships say they do not know everything about their spouse's or partner's finances. bankrate.com (press release, PDF)
- Dew, J., Britt, S., & Huston, S. (2012). Examining the Relationship Between Financial Issues and Divorce. Family Relations, 61(4), 615-628. Longitudinal data on 4,574 couples from the National Survey of Families and Households; financial disagreements were the strongest disagreement type predicting divorce, and fully mediated the association between perceived financial inequity and divorce. doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012.00715.x
- Olson, J. G., Rick, S. I., Small, D. A., & Finkel, E. J. (2023). Common Cents: Bank Account Structure and Couples' Relationship Dynamics. Journal of Consumer Research, 50(4), 704-721. Two-year, six-wave randomized longitudinal experiment with 230 engaged or newlywed couples; couples assigned to merge money in a joint account sustained relationship quality, while separate-account and no-intervention couples showed the normative decline. doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucad020
- Hiekel, N., Liefbroer, A. C., & Poortman, A. R. (2014). Income pooling strategies among cohabiting and married couples: A comparative perspective. Demographic Research, 30(55), 1527-1560. N = 41,456 cohabiting and married individuals across six countries; dual earning, short union duration, absence of joint children and lower relationship commitment are among the most persistent correlates of keeping money separate. demographic-research.org
- Cullen, Z., & Perez-Truglia, R. The Salary Taboo: Privacy Norms and the Diffusion of Information. NBER Working Paper 25145; published in the Journal of Public Economics. Field experiment with 755 employees at a large commercial bank finds employees are both unwilling to reveal their own salaries to coworkers and reluctant to ask about others'. nber.org/papers/w25145
- Mishra, A., et al. (2025). Discussing money with the one you love: How financial stress influences couples' financial communication. Journal of Consumer Psychology. doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1430
- Zelizer, V. A. (1994). The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies. Basic Books; Princeton University Press. The foundational account of "earmarking," the finding that people systematically treat money as non-fungible and assign it social meaning according to its source and its intended relationship. press.princeton.edu
Statistics were verified against these sources in August 2026. Survey figures are restated as new waves publish; the peer-reviewed findings are stable. Nothing on this page is a forecast, and no figure here describes Have Another Cherry's own performance.