Inspiration
Acorns app for investing, and an article written in the alligator by Avery Parker Link: https://www.alligator.org/article/2025/02/homelessness-healthcare-access-gainesville
What it does
Using Plaid's API services, we made a prototype for a website where you can login and link your bank account using Plaid's secure services. The idea would be that any time you make a purchase, you can set it up so that our service will round up your purchase to the next dollar amount and donate the difference to UF HealthStreet or another local healthcare service that aims to provide services to homeless and underprivileged individuals who can't afford their medicine, appointments, etc, as the article explained a large reason for their limitations in providing more services and beyond just appointments was funding. Ideally, options to toggle how often you want it to do this and turn it off would be available (every other purchase, every third purchase, etc), and over time your small rounding up would stack up and be actually very helpful in allowing others to receive the necessary healthcare they need within Alachua county.
How we built it
We used React/JS for everything and the Plaid API.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge was figuring out what to use in order to make transactions and get bank account history. Unfortunately, there was no way for us to safely access our own bank accounts with APIs that could do so without getting approval which could take days, and automation scrips seemed too risky. It was difficult considering bank information is very sensitive, and building a prototype in the time constraint was difficult due to the lack of services available to make real transactions and transfers happen, so we settled on using Plaid's sandbox features.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to get the functionality down and get Plaid's API integrated, despite it being difficult and taking us a very long time to figure out how to approach our project.
What we learned
Reading documentation is very important for not getting behind, and mapping out a plan and what will likely be the best approach is vital so that we don't waste time.
What's next for Change4Change
It would be nice to get this actually connected to real bank accounts through Plaid's production version of the API, and get it to have actual capability of real automatic transfers of the rounded up donations to UF HealthStreet. Additionally, we would like to finish the options for how often you want to donate, and add more local causes to donate to.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.