About us
Built for share houses, by people who lived in them
Mates on Rent started with a whiteboard, a group chat and a recurring argument about the electricity bill.
Every share house runs on the same three questions: who has paid rent, who owes what on the bills, and whose turn it is to do the chores. They sound small. They are why housemates fall out.
The problem with group chats
Most share houses manage money in a chat thread and a shared note. It works until someone pays late, someone leaves mid-month, or someone genuinely cannot remember whether they transferred the internet money. There is no record, so it becomes a matter of who remembers hardest.
What we built instead
Mates on Rent gives the house one shared source of truth. Rent has a status everyone can see. Bills are split once and settled per person. Chores are assigned and tick off. Nothing depends on anyone’s memory.
We added a room marketplace because the other hard moment in a share house is the handover. Someone moves out and you need to fill the room fast, with someone you can live with.
What we decided not to build
We do not process rent payments. Plenty of apps do, and it is the obvious next feature, but moving other people’s money brings licensing obligations and a category of failure we did not want to introduce into a house’s rent day. Instead we track the status of a payment made however the house already pays: bank transfer, cash, whatever works. The record is what was missing, not the payment rail.
We also chose not to build a social network. There is no feed, no profile you maintain, no reason to open the app when nothing has happened. A share house app should be boring and reliable, and should mostly stay out of the way.
How we decide what to build
Every feature has to answer one of the three questions that cause share house arguments: who paid rent, who owes what, and whose turn it is. The room marketplace is the exception, and it earned its place because the handover between housemates is the other genuinely hard moment in a share house.
We answer our own support email, and most of what has shipped in the last year came from those conversations rather than a roadmap. If something in the app is annoying you, telling us is a reasonable way to get it changed.
Who makes it
Mates on Rent is built and operated by Maurya Pty Ltd in Australia. We are a small team, we answer our own support email, and we ship based on what people ask for.