ChopCheap

Inspiration

Do you ever go into a supermarket and walk out with more things than you intended? ChopCheap is your solution with features in budgeting, tracking spending and listing groceries. By choosing the Best Financial Hack, we aimed to provide an easy way for college students to filter recipes and find groceries based on their budget. Unlike other recipe applications that offer budgeting meal plans, our approach guides students through the entire process of finding a recipe to buying affordable groceries. Additionally, by being able to track their spending progress, students can make decisions based on how much money they spent.

What it does

ChopCheap uses an open source database of recipes so that students can search up any recipe based on the type of cuisine they want to eat. The recipes are then filtered based on the budget of the student, as well as what type of cuisine they want to eat. Once students decide on a meal, they can click on the recipe, creating a calendar in which they can plan their meal. Any added meals are then logged on the History tab where students can check how much money they spent. In the History section, students can view the ingredients of their recipes, as well as how much each costs. Also, they’re able to create a grocery list from these ingredients. Finally, there is a dynamic chart that displays the spending trends over time.

How we built it

Backend: We used Python and FastAPI library to query a third-party API (Spoonacular) which provides us with information such as recipes within a given budget and cuisine type. We also receive breakdowns of ingredients and price per recipe. We use an sqlite table to store our history table as persistent data. We associate each history entry with a recipeId, name of the recipe, the time at which it was selected, etc. This allows us to pinpoint exactly when a user plans on spending, retrieve the necessary pricing and ingredient information, and helps us build a visualization of the user’s budget.

Frontend: We used React for the UI and TailwindCSS for styling. We brought all the information from the database in order to display both the recipes and past meals. Shadcn and RadixUI were used for visualization components.

Challenges we ran into:

Git was one of the challenges we ran into. From merge conflicts to inconsistencies across branches to changes being lost, using Git was a challenging, but rewarding experience for our team. Another challenge is learning new technologies such as sqlite and FastAPI. One of our team members did not have a laptop charger and had to find new ways to contribute. He looked into many options including Github Codespaces, which were new to us.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

None of us had ever worked with SQLITE before so we are very proud to have learned and used it within our project, especially with the time constraints (one of us had to code on a tablet). Also, we are proud that we could work under pressure and create a clean user interface as well as implement a variety of features.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to build a working website using React, Fastapi. We also learned how to incorporate a database and display its contents. We learned about all stages of the development process to address an issue, such as finance, from designing to implementing to debugging to version control.

What’s next for ChopCheap

In addition to fixing our current bugs, the next goals for ChopCheap would be to set up a login system so that students can individually track their history and a delivery component where students can order groceries to be delivered. Also, we would like to add more visualization to display the spending habits and pricing of recipes.