BillMe - Understand the policies shaping your life

Inspiration

Everyday people often feel like politics is something happening above them, not something they can understand or influence. Bills are written in dense legal language and most citizens never have the time or tools to decode what those policies actually mean for their lives. We wanted to change that gap between government and the people it serves.

What it does

BillMe is an AI-powered civic intelligence platform that translates California legislation, political news, and election updates into plain English. It gives users personalized bill feeds based on their life context, explains what each policy means in simple terms, shows how it impacts them directly, and provides concrete civic actions like contacting representatives or viewing official bill pages. It also includes an AI chat for questions and a live “What’s Brewing” section for California political news with civic context.

How we built it

We built BillMe as a full-stack application with a Next.js frontend and a FastAPI backend. The frontend handles routing, dashboards, onboarding, and bill pages with a shared layout system. The backend manages all AI logic using Google Gemini Flash Lite for summarization, impact analysis, civic actions, and news interpretation. We integrated RSS feeds from Google News and CalMatters to pull real-time political updates, then process them through AI to generate civic insights. User profiles are stored locally in the browser and used to personalize all responses.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was getting the frontend and backend to communicate smoothly, especially across multiple AI-driven endpoints. We also had to carefully structure asynchronous calls so Gemini responses did not block the API. Another challenge was ensuring consistent formatting of AI outputs so they could be reliably rendered across different UI components.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of building a fully functional end-to-end civic intelligence platform with a polished, editorial-style UI. The personalization system works smoothly, and the AI responses feel contextual and useful rather than generic. The design system also came together strongly with a cohesive California-inspired aesthetic.

What we learned

We learned how important accessibility is in civic technology. Even small changes in language can drastically change how people understand policy. We also gained experience building multi-service AI systems, integrating real-time data sources, and designing around non-deterministic AI outputs in a structured UI.

What's next for BillMe - Understand the policies shaping your life

Next, we want to expand beyond California to support more states and eventually federal legislation. We also plan to improve personalization with richer user profiles and introduce notifications for bills that directly affect users. Another direction is adding community insights so users can see how others interpret the same policies, making civic understanding more social and collaborative.

Built With

• calmatters)
• claude
• css
• fastapi
• gemini
• lucide
• next.js
• python
• react
• rest
• tailwind
• typescript