Odo

Budgeting for students is inherently difficult. To address user spending, we built a widget-focused app that gamifies budgeting to make users aware of their finance.

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Inspiration

Students struggle with budgeting because neither their spending nor their income is consistent:

  • Rent comes out in large chunks
  • Student Finance arrives three times a year
  • Work mostly happens over the holidays

Budgeting apps don't help much. They feel like a lot of responsibility and are daunting to open, so most students avoid them. On top of that, an arranged overdraft makes it easy to spend freely without noticing.

We're students ourselves, and we built Odo around the problems we actually have.

What it does

Odo is a widget-first budgeting app that makes managing money supportive and even fun.

  • Widget first: Odo lives on your home screen and lock screen, so you can't avoid seeing your budget. Even with an overdraft making money feel free, you're shown how you're really spending and can adapt.
  • Gamified and supportive: Your money is fuel. Gauges show how much of this week's budget is left, and a road shows how far your money will take you before your next loan. Every purchase is shown in days of range rather than as a warning.
  • Private, so there's no shame: Widgets never show pound amounts, only gauges, days and a mood, so anyone can glance at your phone.
  • No manual logging: Bank transactions are categorised automatically, and Odo learns from any corrections you make.

How we built it

  • App: Next.js, Supabase and Tailwind, deployed on Vercel
  • Widgets: iOS widgets built in Scriptable
  • Categorisation: Odo first checks a database of known places (common UK shops, plus any corrections you've made). Only unknown places are sent to a small language model, Qwen 2.5 (1.5B) via Ollama. Most transactions never reach the model, which cuts the local compute needed.
  • Bank feed: for the demo, transactions come from a simulated bank

Challenges we ran into

  • Finding the right design: we tried rings, a cairn and a coral reef before choosing fuel gauges, because a fuel gauge rewards making money last rather than filling a target.
  • No real bank data, so we built a simulated bank feed.
  • Making a small model reliable enough to demo live.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Nobody else we found combines all of this, built around how students' money really works:

  • A widget-first design
  • Budgeting counted in days until your next loan
  • No visible amounts
  • Automatic categorisation

We're proud to have built that as a complete, working app in a weekend.

What we learned

Getting students to budget is less about the maths and more about making it visible, supportive and free of shame.

What's next for Odo

  • Connecting to real bank accounts
  • Running the model entirely on the phone
  • Building native widgets
  • Testing Odo with more students

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