Founder story

Why I built recEAT.

There is a very specific kind of chaos that happens after a good dinner with friends.

The food is done. Someone paid with their card. The receipt gets passed around. One person says they did not have the drinks. Three people shared one dish. Someone else only had dessert.

Then somebody asks the question every barkada knows:

That moment is why I built .

recEAT is a Philippine-made web app for splitting restaurant bills based on what each person actually had. Instead of dividing the total equally or doing calculator math in the group chat, you add the receipt items, assign them to the people who ate them, split shared dishes, add the service charge, and get a clear per-person breakdown.

There is no app download required. You can use it directly in the browser and send the finished recEAT to the group.

I did not want to build another generic expense tracker

There are already good tools for trips, rent, shared expenses, and keeping track of who owes whom over time.

But restaurant bills feel like a different problem.

The challenge is not usually remembering that someone owes you money. It is figuring out the amount correctly in the first place.

A dinner might have:

• individual mains
• shared dishes
• drinks that only some people ordered
• dessert
• service charge
• one person paying for the whole table

That is the situation recEAT is designed around.

Built for the way barkadas actually eat

In the Philippines, we already have our own language for this.

There is KKB. There is singilan. There is the friend who says, “Ako muna.”

And eventually, there is always someone asking:

I wanted recEAT to feel like a tool made for that exact moment rather than a generic finance app that happens to support restaurant expenses.

The app currently lets groups split items individually, divide shared dishes only among the people who had them, include restaurant service charge, and create a shareable breakdown for everyone.

After the calculation is done, people can settle however they normally do — GCash, bank transfer, cash, or anything else.

The goal is simple

I want recEAT to become the first thing Filipinos think of when the bill arrives.

Not because splitting bills is the biggest problem in the world.

But because it is one of those tiny recurring annoyances that somehow manages to happen every time friends eat together.

If recEAT can make that five-minute calculator session disappear, that is already useful.

recEAT is currently free to use at receat.app.

And yes, the next time someone asks “magkano sakin?”, I am hoping someone at the table answers: