Gig money splitting for working bands

The idea

Every working band settles up the same way: someone screenshots the Venmo, someone does the arithmetic in the group chat, someone quietly believes they got shorted. The maths is genuinely fiddly because band splits are not equal splits: the leader who books the gigs takes a cut off the top, the sub gets a flat rate, and the PA rental comes out before anyone sees a dollar. Generic bill-splitting apps model none of this.

The wedge is transparency, not calculation. When every member can open a ledger and see the line-by-line arithmetic for every gig, the money resentment that kills bands evaporates. And in January, the leader who paid out $30,000 across five people over a year suddenly needs per-member totals for 1099s, which is the moment they go looking for exactly this.

Who pays

The bandleader pays $8/month, and they pay to stop being the bad guy about money rather than to save time. The buyer is anyone running a cover band, wedding band, or church-adjacent gig circuit doing two-plus paid dates a month. Distribution is musician forums, r/WeAreTheMusicMakers, and Facebook gigging-musician groups, with a January content push on 1099 obligations for bandleaders driving the seasonal signup spike.

MVP scope

• Gig entry with gross pay, off-the-top expenses, and per-member payout rules
• Visible line-by-line split arithmetic on every gig
• Running ledger per member with paid/unpaid status, magic-link access
• January-ready CSV export of per-member yearly totals
• Skip for v1: actual money movement, Venmo/PayPal integration, setlists, gig booking, and mobile apps

Build SplitGig, a payout ledger for working bands. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, auth with magic links, no passwords), Stripe for subscriptions.

Core flow: a bandleader creates a band, adds members by email, and defines default payout rules: leader percentage off the top, equal split of the remainder, and named sub rates (e.g. a fill-in drummer gets a flat $150 regardless of the take). For each gig they enter venue, date, gross pay, and expenses that come off the top (PA rental, fuel, rehearsal room). The app computes each member's cut, shows the arithmetic line by line, and appends it to a running ledger every member can see after logging in with a magic link. The leader marks each payout as paid (cash, Venmo, cheque) so the ledger doubles as an IOU tracker.

Pages: band dashboard (recent gigs, unpaid balances), gig entry form, gig detail with the visible math breakdown, member ledger view, payout rules editor, year-end export page, billing.

Non-obvious details: rules are versioned per gig, so editing defaults never rewrites history; rounding remainders go to the leader and the app says so explicitly. The year-end page exports a CSV of per-member yearly totals formatted for 1099-NEC preparation, filterable by calendar year.

Pricing: free for 3 gigs, then $8/month per band, paid by the leader. One plan, no tiers.