Recurring Shared Expenses, Added and Split Automatically

A recurring shared expense is one that comes back on a schedule: rent, the power bill, the subscription nobody remembers signing up for. Eider calls these repeating expenses, and one is a rule with a name, an amount and a cadence, which adds the expense for you and divides it the way your nest already divides things.

The feature exists because those costs are the most predictable numbers a household has. Rent is the same on the same day. The power bill arrives every month whether or not anyone thinks about it. The subscription renews on its own date and will keep renewing. You know the day, you know the amount to within a few dollars, and you know exactly who it is for.

Most of what a shared-expense app handles is new information. Somebody bought groceries, and the app had no way to know until they said so. These bills are not that. The information was available a month ago, and re-entering it every cycle is work the app can do instead.

You set a repeating expense once. Give it a name, an amount and a cadence, and it comes back on that schedule without you. Rent on the first. Internet on the twelfth. The subscription on whatever day it decided to bill.

Cadence is not only monthly. A rule repeats every so many weeks, months or years, and it can land on the day you actually pay the thing, including the last day of the month or the third Tuesday.

The split works the way it does for any expense. A rule takes the nest's standing split unless you give it one of its own, so rent that divides 60/40 divides 60/40 every time it appears and you never open a picker to say so.

You can edit a rule, pause it, or give it an end date when the lease has one. Pausing stops new expenses from being created and leaves the ones already added in your history. A rule past its end date keeps its history and reads "Ended."

One setting sits alongside all of this. "Once per period" decides what happens when a rule comes due twice before anyone has settled up, and it is on by default in a nest of two and off from three people up. The docs page for repeating expenses explains why it changes at that size.

Rent goes up. The power bill is one number in January and another in July. A rule that assumed the amount never moves would be quietly wrong most months, so Eider has two answers, one for each kind of bill.

If the amount changed once, the rule is fixed and you edit it. New rent from November, the same as ever after that. Expenses already added do not move, because what already happened is a record rather than a guess you get to revise.

If the amount changes every cycle, you set the rule to ask. The two modes are called Fixed and Ask each month. On an Ask each month rule the name, the cadence and the split are already set, and nothing is added until you say what the bill came to. A nudge arrives on the day, you type one number, and it divides itself.

A variable bill cannot be automated, because nobody knows the number until it arrives. What the rule takes off you is everything around it: that the bill exists, the day it lands, who it is for, and how it divides. What is left is the one fact only the bill has.

Any single month can still be different. Override one occurrence, the quarter the water company bills you for a leak, and the rule underneath does not move. The next one goes back to normal.

Repeating expenses are on the free version of Eider. Set up as many as you want. There is no cap, there is no plan to add one, and nothing that is free today moves behind the paywall later.

That is worth saying plainly, because this is the feature that looks like it should cost something. It saves more typing than anything else in the app. Here it is the second thing you would set up, right after the nest.

The rest of the free version is the same shape: nests, expenses, the standing split, settling up, with no member cap and no expense cap. You can run a household on it for years without ever seeing a screen that asks for a card. Plus adds receipt scanning, the receipt library and split by item on top, and it takes none of this away.

A repeating expense also composes with the standing split, and the two are worth keeping apart. A split is how an expense divides. A repeating expense is one that comes back on its own. Each answers a different question: the split says who pays what, and the rule says when it arrives.

Put them together and the predictable costs of a household look after themselves. Rent appears on the first, already divided the way you agreed, and nobody had to type it.