Volumi vs Settle Up: for the crew that crossed a border

Settle Up is genuinely good, and it's free, which we respect. It nails the core job a lot of groups need: log shared expenses, see who owes who, settle up. If that's your whole ask, it's a solid pick and you can stop reading here. This page is for the trip that gets messier than that.

What Settle Up gets right.

Clean, no-nonsense group splitting. It does the fewest-transfers settle-up well, the free tier doesn't nickel-and-dime you on the basics, and it syncs across a group. For a straightforward shared-expense group, it's a fair, honest tool.

Where a trip crew hits the wall.

• Multi-currency depth. On a real multi-country trip (paying in yen, then euros, then pounds, all in a week), the currency handling and rate transparency is where a crew starts wanting more.
• Offline-first. Half a trip happens with no signal. Logging as you go and syncing later is the difference between a kept ledger and a shoebox of mental notes.
• The holdout. On a big trip there's always one person who won't install anything. Volumi tracks them anyway and nudges them to join when it's time to pay up.

How Volumi handles it.

Log every expense in the currency it was actually paid, offline if you're off-grid, and Volumi does the conversion and the fewest-transfers math. Track the holdouts, keep the receipts, and the core stays free.

Honest bottom line.

If your group splits are simple and single-currency, Settle Up is a genuinely good free tool and you won't go wrong. If your trips look like ours (a lot of people, several currencies, spotty signal, one person who won't download the app), that's the exact shape Volumi is built for.