Zero Bound

Second page is the 10 year loan repayment plan for students.
First page where user inputs their documents and information.
Third page is the summary of finances

Inspiration

We were all inspired by our own personal struggle in navigating financial aid and student loans. We wanted an application that could help streamline and create a stress-free process for students to understand their own financial situations.

What it does

The project takes in all the necessary information from the user or student via pdf upload and manual input. From there, the app makes a loan repayment plan that summarizes the key information the student needs, such as how much to pay each month to pay their debt off in time.

How we built it

We created separate repositories for our frontend and backend. The frontend was the UI and the entirety of the website/app that the user was able to view and input data into. The backend did all processing of reading in the uploaded pdfs from the user. The read in pdf is then fed into an AI API that then extracts key information. The information was then supposed to be fed back to the front end to make the loan repayment plan that could be viewed by the user.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled to properly implement our AI at first, but we managed to succeed. However, we failed to merge the fully functional backend and frontend into one repository. We struggled with fetching data from the backend and feeding it to the frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We fully implemented our frontend and backend and we were able to successfully use Gemini API to extract information from pdfs.

What we learned

We learned how to incorporate APIs and work with generative AI in combination with frontend and backend. This hackathon allowed us to get hands-on experience in coding in a fast-paced environment.

What's next for Zero Bound

We will bridge the gap between frontend and backend and successfully exchange information between the two.

Built With

Submitted to

VenusHacks 2025

Created by

I worked on the front end and the backend of the project. I helped develop the financial summary page, and the dashboard page. This is my first time that I have ever worked with APIs.

Arena Galeana Oregon
I worked on the back-end. It was my first time doing so, which was a little challenging but I learned a lot, like how to integrate the Gemini LLM API, use FastAPI, communication between the front- and back-ends, and properly converting the PDF into a text format that could be fed into the API.

Meera Phadnis
I worked on the backend and worked heavily with integrating the Gemini API to be able to take in pdf files and extracting the necessary information for the student repayment plan. Additionally worked on properly routing communication between the backend to frontend components. This was my first hackathon and experience dealing with frontend and backend development.

Sanaa Labador Bebal
I was heavily involved with implementing the frontend program. This was my first experience with React, and I learned a lot about its tools as I changed and developed the dashboard, calculator, and finances pages. This was also my first experience with APIs and implementing the Gemini API into a program.

ahona04 Khandaker

Updates

Meera Phadnis started this project — May 25, 2025 11:33 AM EDT

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