BuyBye

Inspiration

We wanted to create a project aimed towards supporting people who are often left out of traditional financial tools. Many budgeting apps assume users have stable financial habits, disposable income, or financial literacy. Our goal was to build something simple and approachable that helps users to pause before spending, encouraging healthier financial decisions, as well as track user's spendings and align that with their goals.

What it does

BuyBye is a browser extension that interrupts the checkout process of online purchases to help users reconsider impulse purchases. This is achieved through either 5 seconds of reflection before choosing to continue, or having the extension prompt a persuasive note to not purchase the item. The browser extension also contains dashboard of the user's monetary activity based on checkout clicks and an optional bank account connection, along with a financial goal setter.

How we built it

We built BuyBye as a Google Chrome extension using JavaScript and React for the interface and user interactions. We integrated a backend connected to a MongoDB database to store user settings and data. We also used Gemini API to generate contextual persuasive feedback that encourages thoughtful spending decisions. We also implemented Plaid using mock data to demonstrate how a user's bank account can be connected to the dashboard.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge we faced was integrating the frontend extension with the backend services. We also spent significant time handling edge cases, specifically detecting checkout buttons across different websites as well as scraping the details of an item for our database and ensuring the extension didn’t break page functionality while still intercepting purchase actions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We established a clean and organized Git workflow, allowing us to collaborate efficiently throughout the hackathon with minimal conflicts. We also successfully built a fully functional browser extension that interacts with real shopping websites.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to create a Google browser extension, work with a MongoDB database, and connect backend services to the client. We also learned how to integrate new technologies with our existing experience in JavaScript and React, and how different extension architecture is compared to a normal web app.

What's next for BuyBye

Next, we want users to be able to redirect the money they save, for example towards savings account or other investments. We also plan to expand BuyBye for mobile use so it can better support financial mindfulness beyond desktop shopping. With more data from bank account information or mobile use, we will aim to compile the user data to create monthly and yearly summaries of the user's spending for better, long-term reflection.

Built With

• css
• google
• javascript
• manifestv3-extension
• mongodb
• react
• web-apis