Hey! I'm Bacchat 😉

splits + budgets, on-device since… well, this month.

A privacy-first money app for India. Track every UPI / card spend via SMS, settle group expenses without bothering your friends to sign up, and watch your savings grow — all without a single byte of personal spend data leaving your phone.

↓ INSTALL APK SOURCE

Free, open source, sideload-only. No Play Store yet — Android 8+, sideloading instructions in the GitHub release notes.

Features

Two apps' worth of functionality — group splits and personal budgeting — bundled into one APK and stitched together so the same UPI payment doesn't get logged twice.

Privacy by default

Every transaction, every budget category, every merchant tag lives in an on-device SQLite database. The backend only sees what's inherently shared — auth and group splits. No spend data ever leaves your phone.

SMS auto-import

Parses SBI, HDFC, ICICI, YES Bank, and CUBANK formats — including UPI VPA, account-to-account, and Axio-style messages. A background listener and an inbox reconcile path share the same dedupe logic, so the same UPI payment never lands twice.

Splits with placeholders

Friend's not on Bacchat yet? Add them by name as a placeholder member — you keep logging splits under their name, then share a one-time claim link. The moment they sign up, every share moves to their real account.

1-on-1 via QR

Solo splits get their own deduped group. Scan your friend's Bacchat QR (or paste their ID) and the right group opens — no manual "are we already splitting?" rituals.

OCR bill scanner

Snap a restaurant bill. Bacchat reads every line item, lets you assign each one to a subset of the group ("Bob + Carol get the pasta"), and produces a clean per-person breakdown.

Savings ≠ spending

Tag SIP / liquid-fund categories as savings. Money transferred to them counts toward your monthly savings goal instead of eating into the spend budget. Free-form (no-cap) categories are first-class too.

Debt simplification

Six friends, eleven splits, three currencies of payback owed? Bacchat collapses the chain into the minimum set of "X pays Y ₹n" transactions — and tells you which original splits are bundled into each.

Material You theme

The UI adopts your phone's wallpaper colours on Android 12+, with a clean Material 3 fallback elsewhere. Dark mode follows the system. The dot-grid background is the only piece of art we drew ourselves.

Guest web fallback

Got an invite link but you're on iPhone? Open it in a browser — Bacchat serves a SSR'd guest UI for the group so you can view, add, and settle splits without installing anything.

How It Works

  1. 1

    Install & grant SMS

    Sideload the APK. Android 13+ asks for a one-time "restricted settings" toggle so the app can read SMS — Bacchat shows a 4-step walkthrough with a deep link straight to the right settings page.

  2. 2

    Auto-imported spending

    Every UPI / card payment SMS gets parsed in the background and dropped into the local ledger. Duplicates are collapsed across the bank, Axio, and the UPI app so the same transaction shows up exactly once.

  3. 3

    Set a budget

    Pick an income, a savings goal, and categories. Tag each as fixed bills, variable spending, or savings transfers (SIP, liquid). Leave the cap blank for free-form categories you just want to track.

  4. 4

    Split with friends

    Create groups, or scan a friend's QR for a 1-on-1. Add splits manually, or OCR a restaurant bill and assign line items. Placeholder members let you log splits for people not on Bacchat yet.

  5. 5

    Settle up

    One tap settles every debt between you and another member. Debt simplification means the group as a whole always converges to the minimum number of payments.

vs. The Others

Splitwise nails groups. Axio nails SMS budgeting. Neither does both — and both ask for your data on the way in.

Bacchat Splitwise Axio (Walnut)
Group splits Yes — placeholders, OCR, debt simplification Yes (the core product) No
Personal budgeting Yes — fixed / variable / savings, SMS auto-import No Yes (the core product)
SMS auto-import Yes — multi-bank, deduped across senders No Yes
OCR bill scanner Yes — partial-subset assignment Pro only No
Splits for non-users Placeholder + claim link Pseudo-users (limited) n/a
Personal data lives… On your device (SQLite, never uploaded) On their cloud On their cloud (+ ads)
Pricing Free & open source Freemium (Pro ~₹200/mo) Free, ad-supported
Material You / M3 Yes Partial No
Account required For splits only — guest mode for personal use Yes Yes

Get Bacchat

The Android APK lives on the GitHub Releases page. Download the latest one, allow installs from unknown sources for your file manager, and tap to install.

Bacchat is built with Flutter on the client and Express + Prisma on the backend. The whole codebase is MIT-licensed; pull requests very welcome.

↓ LATEST APK VIEW SOURCE