Tricount is the app someone sends you a link to the night before a trip, with a message like “put your expenses in here”. Plenty of people use it to split expenses on group trips without really knowing what it is, who makes it, or why it costs nothing. So how does Tricount work, and who pays for it? This article answers those questions. One thing worth saying up front: we make Banana Split, another expense tracker for groups. What we can offer instead of neutrality is method. Every claim about Tricount below links to the page where Tricount says it, and every number about how groups spend comes from 183,000 real groups tracked in our app.

The short answer. Tricount is a free app to split expenses within a group. How does Tricount work? You create a “tricount”, invite the others with a link, everyone adds what they paid, and the app works out who owes whom with the fewest transfers. It is Belgian, has belonged to the neobank bunq since 2022, and no longer has a paid plan: bunq funds it by offering its bank card inside the app. It works without an account, works offline, and converts currencies for free. It has no web version, no recurring expenses, and an expense can only have one payer. For a trip or a weekend away, it is an excellent choice. For a flatshare that lasts years, it will leave you doing by hand things other apps do for you.

What is Tricount and who is behind it

Tricount describes itself on its App Store listing as the simplest way to track and settle shared expenses between friends. That is the pitch. What is Tricount in practice? An expense tracker shared by a group, and that group is called a “tricount”: a trip, a flatshare, a dinner, a stag or hen weekend. Every member sees the same expenses and the same balances.

The publisher is Tricount SA, a company based in Ixelles, Belgium. Since 2022 it has belonged to bunq, a Dutch neobank, and the website now calls itself “tricount by bunq”. Its home page claims it is trusted by 21 million people across the world, with a rating of 4.8 on the App Store. It is available on iPhone and Android.

How does Tricount work, step by step?

The mechanism is the same in every expense-splitting app, and Tricount applies it without fuss. Here is how Tricount works in five steps.

  1. Create a tricount. In the app, tap the ”+” in the centre, then add the participants. A tricount holds up to 50 people, including you.
  2. Invite the others with a link. How does Tricount work for the people you invite? Everyone joins by tapping the link they received on their phone, with no account to create. The first time you open it, you simply pick who you are from the list of participants.
  3. Everyone adds what they paid. The amount, who paid, and who it was for. “Just enter the amount, select who paid, and tricount will take care of the rest.” You can split unequally, attach a photo of the receipt, and log expenses offline: they sync automatically when you are back online.
  4. The app works out the balances. Tricount determines who has overpaid and who has underpaid, then proposes a way to even things out with as few transfers as possible.
  5. Settle up. A reimbursement is logged like an expense, by switching to “transfer” mode. The app also lets you send a payment request straight to a friend.

That is how Tricount works from the user’s side. If the balance maths interests you, we explained the method, and why four people rarely land on the same figure, in who owes what to whom.

Is Tricount really free?

Yes. Tricount used to have a Premium plan, and it is gone: the help centre says that Premium “has been deprecated” and that the app works “without any monthly fees”. The App Store listing shows no in-app purchases at all. No subscription, no daily expense limit, no ads: Tricount’s own comparison page sums up its free offer as “no ads, no limits”.

Someone has to pay, and that someone is bunq. The app offers a free bunq credit card: “Pay with your bunq card and the expense gets automatically added to your tricount.” So how does Tricount work as a business? It is a front door to the bank. You do not have to open the card to use the app, but you will see it offered, in a tab of its own.

How much does Tricount Premium cost in 2026?

How does Tricount work with currencies?

Tricount handles group trips abroad for free, which not every app does: it automatically converts expenses into a single currency. Each tricount has a main currency. You can log an expense in yen or dollars, but balances and suggested reimbursements are always shown in the main currency, with exchange rates updated daily.

For most groups, that is exactly what you need. It gets awkward when someone wants to be paid back in the currency they actually spent, say a British friend who paid the hotel in pounds and wants pounds back. We covered that whole problem in splitting expenses across several currencies.

Is there a web version of Tricount?

No. The app only runs on iPhone and Android, and tricount.com is there to present it, not to open your groups. No help page describes web access, and we checked in the app in early September. If you are the group treasurer who likes to do the accounts on a big screen after the trip, you will be doing them on your phone.

What Tricount cannot do

Tricount is a very good app for what it sets out to do. Four situations trip it up.

Expenses that come back every month. There are no recurring expenses: rent, electricity or the internet bill have to be typed in again by hand every month. On a trip, that does not matter. In a flatshare, it does. In our data, groups that last more than six months log a median of 43 expenses, and a good share of them repeat.

Two people paying one bill. A Tricount expense has a single payer. If two friends pay the bill on two cards, you log two half-expenses. The balance stays right, the history gets harder to read. That concerns 11% of our groups, and 22% of those that last more than six months.

The computer. No web version, see above.

Very large groups. Fifty participants per tricount at most. That is plenty for a trip with friends, but a club or a big family party can go past it.

None of these limits gets in the way of a weekend. Six groups in ten in our data are done within a week, and that is exactly Tricount’s ground. If your question was “how does Tricount work, and is it right for us?”, for a short trip the answer is yes.

Tricount or another app?

With Tricount explained, the next question is usually whether another app would suit your group better. If you are torn between Tricount and Splitwise, we wrote a full comparison, Tricount vs Splitwise, with a verdict for each type of group. And if Splitwise is the one you are curious about, here is what Splitwise is and whether Pro is worth it.

Banana Split is the app we make. It is free, with no daily limit and no account required, like Tricount, and it adds what Tricount lacks: recurring expenses, several payers on one expense and web access. We built it for the group that takes a trip and then carries on together, a flatshare that goes on holiday, a couple who share the rent.

We keep an honest comparison table of Banana Split, Splitwise and Tricount, including the rows where a competitor does something we do not. If Tricount suits your group, keep it, it is a good app. If you recognised yourself in one of the four situations above, download Banana Split.

Where the information comes from

To answer “how does Tricount work”, everything about the app comes from the pages linked in the text: tricount.com, its help centre and its App Store listing, read on 21 September 2026, plus our own check in the app for web access and recurring expenses, which its pages do not mention. The figures on group behaviour come from 183,000 groups tracked in Banana Split between 2012 and August 2026, each with at least two members and five expenses, reimbursements excluded. The data is aggregated and anonymous. We will correct the article if Tricount changes its offer.