The honest Q & A.

No. Only the host (the person who creates the bill) signs up. Guests open the share link, pick which slot is theirs (the host pre-populates names), and start claiming items. The host's display name is the only personal info a guest sees.

Proportionally. Each diner's tax share is (their subtotal / total subtotal) × tax amount. So if Alex ordered $80 and Sam ordered $20 of a $100 subtotal, and tax is $10, Alex pays $8 in tax and Sam pays $2. If nobody's claimed anything yet, tax falls back to an even split so you don't divide by zero in the preview.

Because service is provided to the whole table, not to individual orders — your server doesn't work harder because someone ordered the lobster. Splitting tip evenly is the default convention in most places. If you disagree, you can adjust the tip amount before locking.

Unlock the bill, add or edit, then re-lock. When you re-lock, every guest sees a clear banner showing how their total changed — "your total went from $24.50 to $26.10." It's logged in the bill's changelog so there's no doubt about what happened when.

Not yet. FriendsBill tells everyone exactly what they owe — you handle the actual paying via Venmo / Zelle / cash / your bank app of choice. The host can mark each diner as paid on their dashboard.

In practice, no — the link only goes to your group chat, and slot names are just labels. It's the same trust model as splitting verbally at the table. If something's wrong, the host can unclaim and re-claim on anyone's behalf before locking.

Each bill gets a unique 22-character URL-safe token derived from 16 random bytes — that's ~10²⁴ of keyspace, so guessing one isn't viable. The public surface is also rate-limited per IP.