BudgetStride

Inspiration

The project scope hinged heavily on Financial Freedom & Independence, so to decide on a project we started out clearly definining these terms.

To us, Financial Freedom is the ability to meet your needs and wants, pursue any goal regardless of cost and make the life choices that call to you without ever anxiously checking your Banking App to see if you can afford a Cheeky 2am Greggs.

Independence is rather objective; being able to function and sustain yourself without reliance on anyone. However, the quality of being independent stems heavily from self confidence. We looked at ideas that could either mitigate financial anxieties or boost confidence.

It felt infinitely easier to focus on reducing financial worries. We thought, why not make something that removes the need to ever check your balance? Why not create an interface that interacts with your Bank Statements for you, and take the burden of managing and planning any goals you have financially, be it a Summer holiday or a Christmas present?

What it does

The application takes in a plethora of lifestyle and financial information about you, as well as linking to your bank to view your transactions. When you spend money in ways that it deems frivolous, it will send you a notification, reminding you - gently or brutally, you get to decide - that that spend could have gone towards something more meaningful, such as one of your budgeting goals.

How we built it

• TypeScript for the back-end
• React / Expo for the front-end
• Starling API for Transaction Information
• Groq LPU for the Response Agent
• Supabase for Database Integration

Challenges we ran into

Using all these resources for the first time was an insane challenge, it was a collection of many resources that we have found to be incredibly powerful and great to speed up the development process, however TypeScript in particular has a special cadence and style to it, that can be hard to wrap your head around.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a functional proof of concept, capable of direct interaction with a Banking API. Going into the program, we did not expect to be able to do that, however mid-hackathon we found it was possible and managed to implement it. We also had no prior experience with TypeScript, with basic JavaScript knowledge, making it even more rewarding to have a tangible deliverable that fulfilled our goals.

What we learned

We learnt an insane variety of things, the seemingly random chaos of Git, the slow realisation that the real demon was a terrible IDE, the significance of a reliable IDE, utilising devtools like Expo to streamline testing.

What's next for BudgetStride

Honing emotional profiles to be more distinct

Granting the Agent managerial privileges over Deadlines & Budgets.

Increasing contextual data yield, through subtler forms of metadata.

Expanding memory to allow for a truly self-improving model that collates and trains itself off the transactions parsed.

More gamified mechanisms / social media adjacent functionality.

Built With

• expo.io
• groq
• react-native
• sterling-api
• supabase
• typescript