A shared ledger for siblings who split the cost of caring for parents
TL;DR Siblingshare is a shared ledger for brothers and sisters who pay for their parents' care from different cities. They agree on each person's share once, log every bill against it and settle up monthly by UPI, directly with each other. The adult children pay for it as a small yearly subscription.
India had 149 million people over 60 in 2022, and that number is heading for 347 million by 2050[1]. A lot of them depend on children who don't live nearby anymore. In a seven-state survey, almost 40% of older people living alone got money from children who lived elsewhere[2].
That money comes from several siblings in uneven, informal amounts. One pays the caretaker, another covers medicines and a third books the train home when something goes wrong. A full-time carer alone costs ₹15,000–30,000 a month[3]. Nobody keeps a clean record, so the sibling who lives closest usually pays more than agreed and the resentment builds quietly until a hospital bill forces the conversation. Sound familiar?
What it does, in regulatory terms: record-keeping and payment links only. Siblingshare never holds, pools or moves money. Under RBI's rules, a non-bank that handles funds for others needs payment aggregator authorisation and ₹15 crore of net worth to apply[4], so every payment goes by UPI straight from one sibling to another, or to the vendor.
A family sets up one parent household and agrees on shares. Those can be equal, income-based or adjusted for the sibling who does the hands-on care, and the app shows the rupee effect of each rule before anyone signs off. Bills go in by photo or forward - caretaker salary, pharmacy, diagnostic tests, insurance premiums and house repairs. Each month Siblingshare works out who owes whom in the fewest transfers and sends UPI links. A year-end statement shows who paid for what, which helps with tax claims and with honest family talks.
The seed was generic shared-expense software with AI fairness. I kept the fairness bit and narrowed it to the one shared bill in Indian families that is big, recurring and emotionally loaded.
The adult children pay, and usually one of them sets it up and drags the rest in. My test price is ₹999–1,999 per family per year, and that's an assumption. Compare it with what they already spend - eldercare memberships from one large provider run ₹1,999–10,999 a month[5]. A later route is selling through eldercare companies, which already bill families and could offer the ledger to their customers.
Eldercare is turning into a paid category, with memberships, nursing and home help billed monthly[5]. The Banking Laws (Amendment) Act 2025 lets depositors name up to four nominees with set shares[6], which pushes families into exactly the kind of who-gets-what conversation this product supports. And UPI makes small sibling-to-sibling transfers free and instant.
There's no public figure for families who share their parents' costs. The nearest number comes from LASI, where about 13% of older men and 11% of older women got money from their children in the previous year[2]. Apply that to 149 million people over 60[1] and you get roughly 1.8 crore older people getting money from children, by my arithmetic. It doesn't tell you how many of them have two or more paying children though.
The big bill-splitting apps are the default for shared costs, and the leader's paid tier adds receipt scanning, default split settings and charts[7], but it's built for trips and flatmates and not a parent's open-ended care. Eldercare membership companies bill one payer and do not split charges among siblings[5]. I found no Indian product built for this, though my search was limited and you should check again.
| Difficulty | Moderate (29/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹35–70 L |
| Time to launch | 3–5 months |
The software is easy to build. Distribution is the hard part, because no family goes looking for this until a fight has already happened. The second hard part is restraint - the product has to stay neutral between siblings, and it must never drift into holding money, which brings RBI into the picture.
No special licence, as long as Siblingshare never touches the money. That design choice is what keeps it light.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI decide what's fair between siblings or judge who should pay more. That's a family decision, and the app has to stay neutral. Check scanned amounts too, because blurry receipts get misread.
Want to work out the AI layer for Siblingshare? Talk to Yash →
Here's what can go south -
It's a small, useful product, and I'd hand it to a founder who understands consumer subscriptions and can reach families through eldercare partners or employers. It is not a venture-scale fintech on its own, so don't pitch it as one. Prove first that 100 families keep logging bills for three months and that 30 of them pay.
The free Siblingshare validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the payment-rules and data-protection checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for siblings, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Siblingshare or something close to it? The make-or-break work is finding families before the argument and not after, and that's a distribution puzzle I'm happy to think through with you. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.