The group chat is dead. Again.
Four players. ₹1,400 court. ₹350 each. Three pay on the spot. One says "I'll send it later." You know how this ends — you front the money, you send the reminder, you wait. Sometimes you forget. Sometimes they do. The ₹350 becomes ₹3,500 across a season, and you are the unofficial bank for a group that just wants to play.
The problem is not the money. It is the chase.
What the split actually needs
Pickleball splits are simple math. One court, one booking, one total. Divide by the players who showed up. That is it. But the flow breaks because:
- The organizer pays the venue upfront — court, balls, water.
- Players arrive at different times, some "on the way" twenty minutes late.
- Cash is rare. UPI is universal. But asking six people to each type your UPI ID and the right amount is friction, and one of them will get it wrong.
- Nobody wants to install a wallet, do a KYC, or keep a balance in an app they open once a week.
What you actually need: one link, each person's share worked out for them, paid straight to the organizer's UPI. No pool. No escrow. No "settle up later" inside an app.
How Court Split handles the split
Court Split builds the split into the game — it is not a separate money app.
- Start from the game. The players who RSVP'd "I'm in" are already there, so you are not retyping a guest list.
- Enter the total — the court cost in rupees — and the app divides it into equal per-person shares (₹1,400 ÷ 4 = ₹350 each). Need an uneven split? Set individual shares and the app makes them add up to the total.
- Tap "Per Person Split" → "Share Split Request". You get one UPI link — the organizer's — with each player's share worked out. Drop it in the group.
- Everyone pays you direct. Each player opens the link, pays their share to your UPI, and the money lands in your account. Never the app's.
The app never holds the money. It only builds the request around your own UPI link — the payment is strictly between each player and you.
Non-custodial means the app never holds, pools, or escrows funds. Every rupee goes player → organizer, direct. In India an app that is not a licensed payment aggregator cannot pool other people's money, so this is not a feature choice — it is the only honest way to build it.
Tracking who has paid (without a payment gateway)
Here is the honest part: because the app never touches the money, it cannot magically detect a UPI transfer. So paid-versus-pending is confirmed by people, not a webhook:
- A player taps "I paid" once they have sent it.
- You confirm received — or simply mark a share paid yourself when the money lands.
- Each player's paid / pending status shows on the game's split, so you can see the two stragglers at a glance instead of scrolling the chat.
One tap sends a reminder to whoever is still pending (rate-limited, so it stays a nudge and never turns into spam). When everyone is settled you earn the Settled Up ✅ badge — and after five games you have run, The Organizer 🗓️.
Recurring games: stop rebuilding the event
Set a game to "Repeats → Weekly" and the game — and its invites — come back on their own, going out automatically fourteen days before each session. You are not recreating the fixture every week, so when it is time to collect, the split is a couple of taps: the venue and the players are already in place.
Late drop-outs and waitlists
If someone bails, the waitlist auto-promotes the next player in line (they get about ten minutes to confirm). Because that settles before you collect, the split you create covers the players who are actually in — you are not chasing money for a head count that changed.
Guests who aren't on the app
You do not need to make everyone install anything. Add a guest by name, and they pay the same UPI link like anyone else — a UPI link works with any UPI app. You mark their share paid when it lands. One drop-in on a Friday should not mean one more account to create.
The only rule that matters
One UPI link per split. Each person's share worked out. Organizer paid direct. The app never touches the money.
Book the court. Share the link. Play.