I personally use the first two, in my roommate / office situation respectively. They work great, frankly. I have very few complaints about either.
If you can do it better, more power to you, but as with any crowded space, I have to ask, because I'm genuinely interested—why did you choose to start from scratch?
We built it a few years ago, and h(ave|ad) big plans to expand into household chores and shopping lists. It's an interesting problem from a couple of perspectives. We've found the more Facebook integration we can do, the better as the target market are very comfortable with Facebook.
It's also a difficult one to make money from - we have some ads on there, but I think to really make it work you'd need integration with another app or some kind of freemium offering (daily deals?)
Yours looks nice - if I could make a suggestion, it would be great to enter email addresses of people to invite, as sending them a hex string is less common and more likely to get lost!
I built something a lot like this in 2004 and used it with a household of 6-8 people for over 5 years with great success. We split rent, utilities and food with it. I let a few other households use it as well, and everybody had a great experience with it.
I've been surprised that nobody has come out with an easy to use service for this, so I'm excited to check yours out!
My one suggestion is to give me a little more information about the service before signing up. Screenshots would be great to see.
Good suggestion about screenshots - I'll put more up soon!
Unfortunately my old version is not generally available, but you can take a look at a few screenshots! Feel free to leave comments with questions: http://flickr.com/gp/aaronpk/LAMz1d/
- Exclude people from cost (only 4 of 5 people do the road trip)
- Fully claim some cost (someone needs the car for a day to move some stuff for himself)
Are there other apps like this with a nice iPhone client?
We do similar things and you might find some inspiration or things you'd like to build into yours. PS. I also did mine for getting familiar with some new web techniques (Backbone + Rails in this case)
I also think backbone looks great in CoffeeScript, and since rails prefers it anyway, I think it works out. Here's a good tutorial on that: [3]
[1] https://github.com/codebrew/backbone-rails [2] http://railscasts.com/episodes/323-backbone-on-rails-part-1 [3] http://adamjspooner.github.com/coffeescript-meet-backbonejs/
