Anchor

Inspiration

So this idea actually came from thinking about what happens after someone loses a parent or a loved one. Like, beyond the grief there's this whole avalanche of admin stuff nobody warns you about — calling the bank, cancelling their Netflix, figuring out Social Security, writing emails to companies you've never even talked to. And you have to do all of this while you're literally still processing that someone you love just died.

We kept thinking, there's no guide for this. You just have to google it and figure it out while crying, basically. So we wanted to build something that takes at least that part off someone's plate. Not fix the grief, obviously nothing can do that, but just handle the boring painful admin part so there's a little more room to actually breathe.

What it does

Basically you tell Anchor what happened, in your own words, no forms or weird dropdowns.

Then it gives you a checklist — like 5 to 8 things you probably need to do, and it tells you which ones are urgent and which ones can wait a bit. So you're not panicking about everything all at once.

And for each task, it actually writes the letter or email for you. Like a real draft, ready to send, you can edit it if you want or just copy paste and go. This was honestly the part we were most excited about because writing "hi, my mom passed away, please close her account" is such an awful sentence to have to write yourself, and now you kind of don't have to.

There's also a little progress tracker so you can see what you've done, and it gives you small encouraging messages as you go.

No login, no database, nothing gets saved anywhere after you close the tab. We wanted it to feel light, not like something tracking your grief in a database somewhere lol.

How we built it

We used Next.js for the frontend and API routes, and Google's Gemini API for the actual AI part, deployed on Vercel.

There's two separate AI calls happening — one that makes the checklist (it returns JSON so we can actually render it nicely), and a second one that only runs when you click into a specific task, which writes the actual letter for that task. We didn't want to generate all the letters up front, felt wasteful and also slower for the user.

Everything is just React state, no database. Kept it simple on purpose given what the app is for.

We also spent a good chunk of time just on how it looks, since like, someone using this is probably not in a great headspace, so we didn't want loud colors or popups or anything stressful. Soft colors, simple fonts, nothing jumping around.

Challenges we ran into

Honestly the AI kept messing up the JSON formatting at first — it kept wrapping it in markdown code blocks even when we told it not to, so we had to add code to just strip that out before parsing it. Small thing but ate up more time than expected.

Getting the letters to actually sound right was harder than we thought too. Too robotic and it feels cold, too casual and it feels weird for something this serious. Took a bit of back and forth on the prompt to get a tone that felt right.

Also we originally wanted to do WAY more — different categories for divorce, job loss, natural disasters, even different languages, maybe even a chatbot for emotional support. But with the time we had we had to be honest with ourselves and just build one thing really well instead of five things half-done. That was probably the hardest call, cutting stuff we were actually excited about.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the whole flow working end to end — input to checklist to real usable letters to tracking progress — actually working, not just mocked up.

Also just, making it feel calm. It's easy to slap together a generic looking app, we tried to actually make it feel intentional for what it's for.

And honestly just sticking to the scope. It's tempting to keep adding stuff but we made ourselves stop and finish what we had instead.

What we learned

A lot about prompt engineering honestly, getting consistent structured output from an LLM is trickier than it sounds. Also learned how much the actual wording and design choices matter when whoever's using your app might be having one of the worst weeks of their life. Little things like word choice actually matter a lot here.

What's next for Anchor

Adding location-based stuff, since document requirements after a death actually change depending on your county or country, so we want Anchor to actually know that instead of giving generic advice Supporting other languages, since grief obviously isn't just an English speaking problem Expanding beyond just "loss of a loved one" into other hard situations — divorce, job loss, natural disasters — since honestly the same structure (checklist + drafted letters + tracking) works for basically any big life disruption Maybe eventually some kind of emotional support piece too, but that one we want to be really careful with, probably wouldn't want to do that without talking to actual mental health professionals first

At the end of the day we just wanted to build something that gives people a little bit of steady ground when everything else feels like it's falling apart. That's kind of the whole idea behind the name too.

Built With

• css
• gemini-api
• google-gemini
• javascript
• next.js
• react
• render
• typescript