Benefits Digger

Inspiration

Our team members, Sid and Ashish, volunteered at an elderly care center last summer. During their time as volunteers, they helped seniors with any tech work. They quickly noticed a recurring problem: seniors struggled to navigate browsers and often couldn't tell legitimate government and benefits websites from scammy or confusing ones. Many were missing out on benefits they were entitled to simply because finding the right information online felt overwhelming. That experience stuck with them, and Benefits Digger was born from a desire to fix exactly that.

What it does

Benefits Digger is a simple web platform that helps users find legitimate government benefits and assistance programs they qualify for. Instead of forcing users to navigate complex browsers or sift through unreliable search results, Benefits Digger presents a clean, easy-to-read interface where users can answer a few straightforward questions and instantly see the benefits available to them — with direct, verified links to official sources.

How we built it

We built Benefits Digger with simplicity as our north star at every layer of the stack. The frontend is built with HTML/CSS/JS for a clean and high-contrast layout optimized for readability. On the backend, we used Fast API and Gemini 3.1 Pro to sift through the web for benefits. SQLite and SQLAlchemy handle our database, which stores the question bank for the screening.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was designing for an audience that finds technology intimidating. Every UI decision had to be reconsidered from the perspective of someone who rarely uses a browser. Font sizes, button placement, plain-language copy, and minimizing the number of steps all required multiple iterations. We also faced the challenge of sourcing and maintaining a reliable database of benefits programs, since eligibility rules vary significantly by state and change frequently.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're especially proud of the benefits matching engine, which handles a surprisingly complex web of eligibility criteria while presenting the results in a way that never feels complicated to the end user. We also added an explore feature that can look for specific benefits for people who do not want to go through the entire screening process. This helps streamline the process for people who have a very strong idea of what they qualify for.

What we learned

We learned that designing for accessibility and simplicity is much harder than designing for a technically proficient audience. Every assumption we had about what a "basic" interface looks like had to be thrown out and rebuilt. We also learned a lot about the landscape of benefits in the US — there are far more programs available than most people realize, and the biggest barrier to access is often just awareness and navigation, not eligibility.

What's next for Benefits Digger

We plan to expand the benefits database to cover all 50 states with up-to-date eligibility information, and to add a guided walkthrough mode that walks users through the application process for each benefit step by step.

Built With

• css3
• fastapi
• google-gemini
• html5
• javascript
• python
• sqlalchemy
• sqlite