Saily, the travel eSIM service created by the team behind NordVPN, is moving further beyond mobile data with a new expense sharing feature aimed at one of group travel’s least glamorous rituals: figuring out who paid for dinner, the taxi, the hotel and everything in between.

Available inside the Profile tab of the Saily app, the tool lets logged-in users create a group, record shared costs and see continuously updated balances. The timing is interesting. eSIM providers have spent the past few years competing on coverage, price, unlimited plans and app experience. Saily is now testing a different proposition: what if the connectivity app stays useful after the traveler is already online?

That is a much bigger product question than splitting a restaurant bill.

Group travel, minus the spreadsheet

The basic idea is familiar to anyone who has used a dedicated expense-sharing app. A traveler pays for something, adds the expense, chooses who participated and lets the app calculate the balance.

Saily supports groups of up to 20 people. Expenses can be entered in different currencies and divided equally, unequally or by percentage. The app converts them into the group’s chosen default currency and keeps the running balance updated. Saily says payments themselves still happen outside the app; once money has changed hands, users record the settlement. Its “Smart settle” feature then restructures the final balances so the group can settle with fewer transactions.

Travelers can:

• Create a group with a name, icon and default currency.
• Invite up to 20 members by email.
• Add expenses in multiple currencies.
• Split costs equally, by custom amounts or percentage.
• See who owes whom in real time.
• Use Smart settle to reduce the number of repayments.
• Record payments, review settlement history and archive completed trips.

“Group trips should be remembered for the experiences, not for uncomfortable conversations about money. With expense sharing, we want to remove another small but common source of travel stress and help people stay organized from the moment they leave until everyone is back home,”

says Vykintas Maknickas, CEO of Saily.

Saily is entering someone else’s territory

The feature is useful, but it is not new as a category.

Splitwise has long offered group expense tracking, unequal and percentage-based splits and its own “Simplify Debts” function, which reduces the number of payments required without changing anyone’s total balance. One difference matters for international trips: Splitwise says its debt simplification operates separately within each currency rather than combining balances through currency conversion.

Tricount is an even more interesting comparison. It supports group expenses, settlement suggestions, offline tracking and automatic conversion of expenses into a common currency. More importantly, Tricount now also offers eSIM connectivity. In other words, the two products are approaching the same traveler from opposite directions: Saily started with connectivity and is adding trip utilities; Tricount started with shared expenses and is adding connectivity.

Fintech apps are also part of the competitive picture. Revolut’s Group Bills lets users create groups, add bills, choose how costs are split and invite people who do not have a Revolut account. Wise offers bill splitting with currency conversion and payment-request links for non-users. Both have an advantage Saily currently lacks: they sit much closer to the actual movement of money.

That means Saily’s feature will probably appeal most to groups already using its app. Travelers who already run every shared trip through Splitwise, Tricount, Revolut or Wise may not see enough reason to move their expense history into another system.

From eSIM app to travel layer

The broader strategy is clearer when expense sharing is viewed alongside Saily’s other additions. The app now includes web protection, ad blocking, virtual locations, an optional US phone number and travel perks such as airport lounge and fast-track bookings. Saily Ultra adds further premium benefits.

Saily has also introduced shared mobile-data plans for groups of up to five people on eligible plans, bringing the “travel together” idea directly back to its connectivity core.

This is where the launch becomes more significant. Major eSIM-first apps such as Airalo and Holafly still present their apps primarily around buying, installing, topping up and managing connectivity, alongside loyalty or referral features. Saily is deliberately widening the app’s job description.

The real test is whether travelers keep opening the app

Expense sharing will not make Saily a better network, and that is precisely why it matters. eSIM products are becoming easier to compare and increasingly difficult to differentiate purely through gigabytes and destination lists. The next battleground is frequency of use.

Saily’s opportunity is to turn a utility travelers might open once or twice per trip into something they keep returning to. The risk is feature creep: a travel app becomes less useful, not more useful, if every adjacent problem is pulled inside it without being solved as well as specialist tools solve it.

For now, Saily’s expense sharing looks thoughtfully implemented rather than gimmicky, particularly the multi-currency handling and Smart settle function. But Splitwise, Tricount, Revolut and Wise set a high bar. The more revealing market signal is the convergence itself: connectivity apps are adding travel services, while finance and expense apps are adding connectivity. Whoever earns the traveler’s home screen may eventually sell much more than data.