Given a prime p, an integer $$H\in [1,p)$$, and an arbitrary set $${\mathcal {M}} \subseteq {\mathbb {F}} _p^*$$, where $${\mathbb {F}} _p$$ is the finite field with p elements, let $$J(H,{\mathcal {M}} )$$ denote the number of solutions to the congruence $$\begin{aligned} xm\equiv yn~\mathrm{mod}~ p \end{aligned}$$for which $$x,y\in [1,H]$$ and $$m,n\in {\mathcal {M}} $$. In this paper, we bound $$J(H,{\mathcal {M}} )$$ in terms of p, H, and the cardinality of $${\mathcal {M}} $$. In a wide range of parameters, this bound is optimal. We give two applications of this bound: to new estimates of trilinear character sums and to bilinear sums with Kloosterman sums, complementing some recent results of Kowalski et al. (Stratification and averaging for exponential sums: bilinear forms with generalized Kloosterman sums, 2018, arXiv:1802.09849).