Lumela began the way most small tools do: a specific group of people, a specific weekend, and a problem nobody had solved well enough to stop complaining about it.
The trip was a festival. Twenty-something people, several cars, a camp that needed to be found twice a night, and a group chat that had turned into an archaeological dig. The tickets were in someone's email. The schedule was a screenshot. The money was a running argument that everyone was too polite to have.
There were apps for pieces of it. One for splitting bills, one for itineraries, one for maps, one for lists. None of them knew about the others, and none of them worked in a field with no signal — which is precisely where a festival happens.
One shared space per trip, holding the five things a group actually argues about: what's happening and when, who owes who, where things are, what needs to be brought, and where the tickets live. Not a social network. Not a chat app. Not a place to post photos of your holiday — there are enough of those.
These aren't marketing lines. Each one has cost us weeks at some point.
Every screen has to be useful with the network off. That single constraint dictated the caching, the mutation queue and a great deal of the architecture — and it's the reason the app doesn't fall over at the exact moment you need it.
A stale location is labelled as stale. A document that couldn't be downloaded says so. An expense you deleted can be restored. Confidence in a wrong number is worse than an honest 'we're not sure'.
We show the pairwise picture, itemise both directions, and freeze exchange rates on the day of the expense — because the goal isn't the smallest number of transfers, it's a number people believe.
Hebrew, English and Spanish, right-to-left included, down to the widgets and the push notifications. A shared plan that half the group reads in a second language isn't really shared.
No ads, no data sales, location off by default and scoped to one group, and account deletion you can do yourself in the app. There's no clever business model hiding behind the free tier.
A group is only as good as its least-supported member. When something ships on iPhone, the same thing is expected on Android and the web — and when it drifts, we run a full audit and close the gap.
Feature requests, bug reports, or an event you'd like to see supported — the address is real and a person answers it.
Lumela