Inspiration
We believe that a majority of people want to do good in the world. At the same time a lot of people believe that they cannot afford to give anything. This is why we created Budget For a Cause, the application that allows you to take control of your finances so you can give more effectively.
What it does
Budget For a Cause is a budgeting application that gives you the power to give more effectively. You decide how much you want to give every month, and we give you the knowledge to do so. You can even set up automatic payments to your selection of charities. Every bit counts so we will take whatever you can afford and split it among all of your selected charities.
How we built it
We use Node.js to host a server-rendered web-application using Pug and Sass. We also use AWS to host an instance of a MySQL database for transactions.
Challenges we ran into
We attempted to use the Plaid API which allows developers to scrape bank transactions and categorize your spending. We also planned to simulate a transaction in real-time using the Vantiv e-Commerce API. We got the API working outside of the project but ran out of time to actually implement the scenario in the web page.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We believe that Budget For a Cause could be a lot more than just a hackathon project, we hope to take this idea farther and make a huge impact on society.
What we learned
We never had any experience with server-side rendering with Node.js so we learned Pug. It was a bit weird to use at first but it made templating really easy once we really got into it. Although we didnt implement it, we learned to use the Plaid API which is really detailed in scraping transactions.
What's next for Budget for a Cause
We plan to implement the Plaid API fully to scrape transactions to be really accurate. We plan to implement a payment processing system using Vantiv or Stripe. Lastly we hope to focus on growing this idea much further.
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