Are you sharing your subscriptions with your sister, cousin, friend, aunt, uncle and paying for them alone? NOT ANYMORE!! Bring them on Splitsub and split the costs.
OTT and music subscriptions such as Netflix, Prime Video, Hotstar, Zee5, Sony LIV, Voot, Gaana, Spotify, Alt Balaji, etc. along with work-related subscriptions such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Grammarly, Otter, Microsoft Office, and more are the necessities for the current generation. These subscriptions can cost anywhere between Rs 300 per year to more than Rs 1000 per month and therefore sharing them with their friends and family is common user behaviour. This cost is, however, not shared amongst the users, resulting in freeloading.
This is why co-founders Dhruv and Ankur, who met during their MBA at ESADE Business School, started Splitsub to eliminate the social awkwardness that comes up when asking people to pay their share. Coincidentally, Dhruv’s sister ended up sharing his Netflix account credentials with all her friends which validated this idea further. Enters fintech start-up Splitsub which, as the name suggests, splits your costs by letting you share subscriptions with your friends and family.
Splitsub is not their first startup. Before Splitsub, the founders had a start-up named Omadre Medico SL in Spain which helped neonatal units to securely manage breast milk for premature babies. Due to the COVID-19, things changed for the healthcare industry and innovations came to a halt. Therefore, the founders retained the tech team and moved back to India to start Splitsub.
Splitsub is a one-stop solution for the current generation’s multiple subscription needs. It offers encrypted password sharing and facilitates timely automated payments while saving up to 80%. The startup does not manage or sell subscriptions but only handles the payments. The start-up has a strict refund policy to protect the interest of customers from fraudulent users. The platform charges users a nominal fee of Rs10 on every transaction. All transactions are done in Splitsub Credits where 1 Rupee = 1 Splitsub Credit.
This Gurugram based start-up, with its headquarters in Delaware, USA has a team of 10 employees. Splitsub is currently bootstrapped and part of the Y Combinator Winter 2021 batch.
The app launched on April 1 2020, and over 10,000 people signed up in the first two months. After receiving feedback from the users, an updated version of the app was released in August 2020 with the requested features. The key target audience is between the age of 18 and 35 comes from Metro and Tier1 cities. The app is currently available only in India on Android and iOS play stores.
Splitsub is one of its kind and the only group discovery platform in India. The Startup is positioning itself as a C2C expense management app for digital subscriptions and soon going to become an online subscription marketplace. They are also working to add machine learning to improve group discovery and AI chatbot support for users to provide instant resolution for most common issues.
The current OTT market size is above $100 billion worldwide and is expected to reach over a trillion dollars by the end of 2027 as per reports. OTT market has shown exponential growth in the Indian market over the past couple of years with over 90 OTT players, 200 Million OTT content users and subscribers and it’s ought to grow to 500 million subscribers by the end of the year 2023.
Amidst the pandemic, the founders have created a business foreseeing the lockdown and work from home culture, finding themselves in a rapidly growing industry. Having multiple subscriptions has become more of a necessity than a luxury and Splitsub aims to reach every household by making all subscriptions accessible by splitting and saving money.