Questions, answered straight

It’s free, and here is the pledge in full:

Everything Tot Up does today is free and always will be — keeping the tally, splitting, settling up. No caps, no ads, no Pro tier. The only thing we could ever imagine charging for is an optional way to pay inside the app, if we ever build one. We haven’t, and nothing you use today would ever move behind it. Tot Up is not a bank, and we never touch your money.

The honest economics: Tot Up is cheap to run precisely because we never handle money — there’s no payment infrastructure to pay for. No in-app way to pay exists today and none is planned; the pledge just refuses to promise the future dishonestly.

Yes — everyone signs in with their email. But that’s the whole of it: we send you a link, you tap it, you’re in. No password to invent, no app to install — Tot Up runs in the browser. The email is what gets your trips back if you lose your phone: sign in on any device and everything’s there. And a friend who can’t be bothered yet can still be part of the trip — add them by name, log their share of everything, and when they do join, their whole history is waiting for them.

We use it to sign you in and to keep your trips recoverable. That’s it. No marketing emails, no newsletter, no sharing it with advertisers, no selling it — the only email Tot Up sends is the sign-in link you asked for. The fine print is on the privacy page, and it’s short.

They can — anyone in the trip can fix anything, because that’s how groups of friends actually work. But nothing vanishes: every edit records who changed what and what it said before, and a removed expense stays visible with one tap to put it back. Nobody can quietly rewrite history — the trip’s activity feed shows everything. Honesty is enforced by visibility, not by locking your friends out.

Cash is a first-class citizen. Handed Sam £40 at the airport? Record a payment and the balances move like anything else. Paid for the taxi in cash? It’s just an expense — add it in whatever currency the notes were.

Yes. Enter each expense in the currency you paid in; Tot Up converts everything to pounds at the European Central Bank’s published rate for the day you paid, shows the rate and date on the expense, and never changes it afterwards. If you want your bank’s exact figure instead, type it in. All the settling at the end happens in pounds — one thing to pay, no rate arguments. The full workings are on the Fair maths page.

Between you, directly — Tot Up never touches the money. When you settle up you get a short list like “Priya pays Sam £41.20”, and each line shows how Sam wants to be paid: bank details to copy straight into your banking app, or a Monzo or PayPal link (PayPal opens with the amount filled in; for the others you copy the amount). Every line includes a short reference — like TOTUP LISBON 3F7K — so the payment is easy to spot on a statement. Then both sides confirm: payer taps “I’ve paid”, payee taps “Got it”, and only then does the ledger move. One caveat, which the app also states: we can’t verify anyone’s bank details, so double-check with your friend before sending a large amount.

People with the trip’s invite link — that’s the boundary, and we’re plain about it: anyone with the link can see and add to the trip, so only share it with your group. If it leaks, the organiser can replace it and the old link stops working instantly. Trips are never public, never searchable, and messaging apps’ link previews are shown nothing but the trip’s name and how many people are in it. Payment details are tighter still: only people in your trips can see yours, and only when they owe you.

Yes, and here’s exactly how it works — from inside the app, not by writing to anyone. The trip’s organiser can delete a trip: it disappears for everyone immediately, the organiser has 7 days to undo a slip, and after that it’s destroyed, with every residual copy — including our backups — gone within about 37 days. Before deleting, the app offers you the export, so the group can keep its own record. To take your email off a trip, ask whoever runs it to release your name. One honest limit: your name and the amounts in a shared trip belong to the whole group’s ledger — like messages in a group chat, they stay unless the trip itself is deleted. If you want a trip gone entirely, ask its organiser to delete it.

Expenses you add are kept safely on your phone and marked “not synced” until they reach the others — nothing you type is ever lost, and nothing syncs silently. You can also keep reading the trip as you last saw it. Tot Up does need a connection for the moments where everyone must see the same thing — joining, and confirming payments.

No — and deliberately. A kitty is a pot of money someone holds; whoever holds it becomes the group’s banker, and that’s precisely the job nobody wants. Tot Up holds nothing. Everyone pays as they go, the ledger keeps score, and at the end the group squares up directly with each other. Same fairness, no banker.