ClearBudget - Finance Coach for Students (AI)

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Inspiration

Millions of students globally struggle with personal finance. With rising tuition, rent, and living costs, most have no structured way to understand where their money goes or how to save. Existing tools are too complex, too generic, or built for professionals, not students living on tight budgets. I wanted to build something a student could open on their phone, fill in their numbers, and get real advice in under 60 seconds for free, no sign-up, no financial background needed.

What it does

ClearBudget is a web application where students input their monthly income and expense categories. The app instantly visualises their spending breakdown as a pie chart and sends the data to Claude AI, which returns a personalised financial health assessment, overspending alerts, and three specific savings tips, all in plain English with no financial jargon.

How we built it

Built solo using React and Vite for the frontend, Chart.js for the real-time spending pie chart, and the Anthropic Claude API for the AI advice engine. The app constructs a structured prompt from the user's financial data and sends it to Claude, which returns personalised, plain-English advice tailored to that student's exact situation. Deployed on Vercel for instant global access.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest technical challenge was handling CORS when calling the Anthropic API directly from the browser. After experimenting with proxy configurations, I resolved it using Anthropic's direct browser access header. I also had to carefully design the AI prompt to ensure Claude's responses were consistently structured, friendly, and actionable rather than generic which took several iterations to get right.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a fully functional, deployed, AI-powered web application completely solo within the hackathon timeframe. The app works end-to-end — a student can enter their finances and receive genuinely useful, personalised advice from Claude AI in seconds. The combination of real-time data visualisation and conversational AI output makes it feel polished and production-ready, not like a hackathon prototype.

What we learned

I deepened my understanding of integrating large language model APIs into real-world products, specifically how to engineer prompts that produce consistently structured and useful output. I also learned how to handle browser-based API security constraints and how to design a UI that makes complex financial data feel approachable and non-intimidating to everyday users.

What's next for ClearBudget - Finance Coach for Students (AI)

The immediate next steps are adding support for multiple currencies, allowing students to save and track their budgets month over month, and integrating open banking APIs so expenses can be imported automatically rather than typed in manually. Longer term, ClearBudget could partner with universities to offer it as a free financial wellness tool for enrolled students, and expand into loan tracking, scholarship budgeting, and peer spending benchmarking.

Built With

• ai
• chartjs
• react
• vercel
• vite