I used Billmonk for years with my flatmates until, sometime last year, their site became so consistently unreliable -- and often unreachable -- that we moved to a competitor (splitwise).

I heard nothing from Billmonk for months until this odd email, on March 30:

  It's been a while. Our apologies for the long silence. 

  We know many of you have complained about the downtime of BillMonk, 
  especially over the last 6 months. Well, we heard your call
  and are acting on it now.

  Uptime is coming. We have some exciting news for you lined up next week!

Best of luck to the billmonk team. We've moved on.

Let's put this into context. I am from Singapore, and I know the founders who do it. And there is a trend here that we do alot of things, to be what I call a masquerade.

They have launched for approx slighty more than half a year. Their Google Play shows around 1-5k __downloads__. Let's peg the iPhone to be 2x of Google Play. So lets make that a cap of 15k in the best-case scenario. But these are downloads, assuming 50% retention rate (which is really superb, they have 7.5k active users.

50 * 7.5k puts that to be about 375000 users. How many of that are actives? We don't know. So yes, an acqusition for a total of 375000 on a best case scenario?

To put it bluntly, this is a classic case of a masquerade. This is no news, this is just a marketing attempt. The thing is, the Singaporean startup scene DOES THIS ALL THE TIME. In less than 6 months, this is the 2nd time I see an acquisition as marketing piece. And then there are vanity metric bragging, etc.

Oh well. Can we stop celebrating marketing campaigns already?

I don't think anyone was celebrating this news, especially given the lack of details. It's clear that something like what you described is what's going on, but the news is still interesting in that a relatively new startup is able to pick up a previous competitor.

I'm interested to see what they do with the new users.

Billmonk seemed to exist mainly to funnel people towards their person-to-person phone-based money transfer system called Obopay. I can't imagine they have many users left after having abysmal uptime for months. I switched our group to SplitWise and haven't looked back.