Introducing Dobi Split

Now that the blog is finally up, we're using the first post to give a proper introduction.

Another expense-sharing app?

Dobi Split came out of frustration with the tools that already existed. Most of them force you to create an account and install something that then asks for an extensive list of permissions. That creates two problems that genuinely bothered us.

The first is privacy. Once your spending data lives on someone else's servers, you're trusting that it'll be handled responsibly, not just today but also through future terms-of-service changes, ownership transfers, and security incidents you'll probably never hear about. Most people accept this because there's no real alternative. We wanted to build one.

The second problem is that one person in the group. The one who refuses to install yet another app or create yet another account. That's not stubbornness. It's a reasonable response to years of software built on monetising user data. The result is usually that the group doesn't switch tools at all, or leaves that person out. Neither is great.

We wanted to solve both at once: a web app that works without registration, where we ourselves have no access to your data, even if we wanted to.

Here's concretely how that works. When you create a new group, your browser generates an encryption key locally and embeds it in the invite link. That key is never sent to our servers. It lives in the URL fragment (the part after the #), which browsers don't include in server requests by design. When someone opens the link, their browser reads the key out of the URL and uses it to decrypt the group data. What reaches us is ciphertext we can't read.

In practice: joining a group is clicking a link. No account, no install, no permissions prompt. Even that one person can manage it.

Fully European

This mattered to us from the start. Dobi Split runs entirely on European servers, operated by European providers. GDPR compliance isn't an afterthought but the starting point.

Concretely: your data doesn't leave the EU, and the legal protections of GDPR apply by default rather than as a voluntary assurance. A European app running on European infrastructure should be the norm. It isn't always.

So where does Dobi come from?

Every founding story has a personal thread somewhere, and ours is pragmatic rather than dramatic.

I (Dominik) originally built the site so my partner and I could manage our shared expenses. DoBi is the nickname her aunt gave us as a couple, a blend of our names. The domain was free. The name stuck. Now it's an app.

Not the most exciting origin story, but an honest one. Admittedly, building an entire app just to track shared expenses is maybe a touch pedantic. But it turned out well.