New features survey and launch

Welcome to our blog! Today is our official launch for the beta, and we're really excited about the new platform and the new homepage. We've been wanting to add bill-tracking since we launched the original rent-splitting calculator. The coolest new features:

• Quick-add: You can type expenses (and payments) in plain English.
• Email reminders: Because everyone forgets.
• Tracking: We keep track of who writes the rent check when it gets paid. No emails necessary.

And... we're back

The beta of SplitTheRent is back online - woot!

Heroku is down

Amazon EC2 is having issues which has taken down our web-host, Heroku. SplitTheRent.com's beta will be down until this is resolved, but until then, you can still use our rent-calculator at SplitTheRent.org.

Our new blog

Welcome to the new Split The Rent blog! We're going to post new survey results, fairness tools, articles about the economics of sharing, and SplitTheRent features and development notes here. We hope you enjoy reading. Here are some ways you can look out for updates.

Does it really work? Feedback on the Rent Calculator

Thanks to interest from readers and responders like you, I have had a lot more opportunity to check my original work and the calculator is holding up quite well under public scrutiny. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback or wrote notes of congratulations - it's made this whole project really, really fun!

Right after launch, I started collecting voluntary feedback from people using the calculator. Originally, I simply asked people to rate the calculator on a 1-5 scale. Here are the results from the first 1,338 respondents (before I switched the feedback system to the present one, which is still collecting data).

Survey results - Split the Rent accurate to within 10%

Fairness is a funny thing. One person's fair is another person's rip-off. So it is important for a rent-splitting calculator to jive with a broadly intuitive sense of fairness. It can't just be what I think is fair - or what any one person thinks - or it won't be useful.

In order to validate and calibrate the formula I used for the rent-share calculator on this blog, I did a rather in-depth survey on "apartment sharing fairness" with my friends. Here are the results - enjoy!