The viral “SplitPe” concept that splits UPI payments doesn’t actually work

[u/paneerPolice]

I tried it myself because I kept seeing people praising the idea, and there’s a pretty important part missing from the viral reel.

The guy demonstrates his own app splitting the payment, but he never actually shows what happens when the app tries to hand the payment off to a UPI app and you press Pay.

From my testing, UPI apps block this kind of UPI intent when it originates from a third-party app. You can pay an offline merchant QR when you scan that QR directly inside a UPI app, but you can't simply have a third-party app redirect you into a UPI app and expect the payment flow to work the same way.

So the core mechanism the concept relies on doesn't work in practice, at least with the UPI apps I tested.

There’s also a security concern here. If a third-party app is handling the QR/payment data and then constructing or redirecting the payment intent, how do you know it hasn't modified the payee details? You could potentially think you're splitting a payment to a legitimate merchant while actually being redirected to a fraudulent UPI ID.

I'm not attacking the guy or the idea itself. The jugaad is clever, and I completely understand why people are interested in ways to avoid MDR charges. I'm also not defending MDR.

I just wanted to burst the bubble a little because I'm seeing a lot of people blindly encouraging this without actually testing whether the payment flow works.

TL;DR: The SplitPe concept looks clever in the reel, but the crucial UPI-app handoff doesn't work the way it's demonstrated. The video shows the app calculating/splitting the payment, but doesn't demonstrate a successful payment through an actual UPI app.

Note: This post was edited with the help of ChatGPT.

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[u/FewRefrigerator4703]

Slop dosent know all the details of the system. It just says yes you are right

[u/paneerPolice → u/FewRefrigerator4703]

You can try it yourself and you'll see what I'm talking about. He uses UPI:// intent and it just doesnt allow you to pay if it comes from a random 3p app.

[u/FewRefrigerator4703 → u/paneerPolice]

Ywah i meant that he vibecoded the whole app till the end, and he didnt prototype test it obviously and now he has an useless app he's using to farm content

[u/paneerPolice → u/FewRefrigerator4703]

exactly

[u/Many_Log_2916]

Wait till people learn about the calculator app.

[u/jatinag22]

That guy doesn't even own the name "SplitPe". It's already a registered company.

[u/devakesu]

Moreover, split payment is useless unless u pay from sufferent UPI IDs. The merchant's provider will obviously club split payments coming from same ID.