Inspiration
Where does all my money go ? If you have been asking this question to yourself frequently, you are not alone. Handling finances can be tricky. This project is an attempt to help you plan right so that you worry less while living from paycheck to paycheck.
What it does
This app scrapes your Gmail receipts of e-commerce websites like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Ola, Uber, and emails you a report generated by plotting your spending data.
How we built it
We handcrafted the Gmail inbox search syntax for getting the receipts of the e-sellers. We set up the Gmail API, SendGrid for pushing emails, and used Heroku to host our demo app. View the README for further details.
Challenges I ran into
- The email report took time to generate: shifted the process to a child thread to complete the request.
- Reloading the rendered thank you page after completing the request lead to duplicate POST request: shifted the thankyou page to a new route.
- Altair is widely used for interactive plot renders using javascript. However, Gmail blocks all scripts in the email content: generated png plots that can be easily attached to emails.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
- The project launch post on Linkedin received 2000+ hits within a week.
- The demo app received 200+ visits on the first day of launch with a successful request completion rate of above 60%
- Build the end to end application in a weeks time
What I learned
- How various APIs like Gmail, Sendgrid, and Altair can be used to leverage the untapped data.
- Deploying an app on Heroku
- Handling and routing client requests on a web server
- SQL Alchemy, database integration with Flask
What's next for Bahi Khata
After receiving encouraging support across social platforms, we are excited to have more contributors. We plan to bring more e-sellers under Bahi Khata's purview and plan to squeeze out interesting insights from the data.
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