Cowboy Cash

Landing Page
Login and Registration
Dashboard
Budget Planner
Dashboard With Saved Plan

Inspiration

We wanted to build a simple, personal, and encouraging financial tool to combat the complexity of typical budgeting apps. We envisioned a "financial sidekick" to help users easily take control of their finances, so we built Cowboy Cash to help them wrangle their spending.

What it does

Cowboy Cash is an intelligent budget planner that simplifies financial management. Users input their income and expenses, and our AI generates a personalized budget with actionable tips. The app features text-to-speech to read the plan aloud and supports real-time collaboration, allowing multiple users to edit a shared budget simultaneously.

How we built it

We used a modern, serverless stack: Frontend: React, TypeScript, and Vite. APIs: Google Gemini for AI-powered advice, ElevenLabs for text-to-speech, and Auth0 for authentication.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was attempting to implement the real-time collaboration feature using Cloudflare Durable Objects, which involved debugging complex state synchronization and "hanging worker" errors. Integrating multiple external APIs and managing asynchronous state on the frontend was also a significant hurdle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of successfully building a full-stack, real-time, serverless application. Implementing the seamless integration of AI and text-to-speech to create a unique and valuable user experience was a major achievement for us.

What we learned

This project was a tremendous learning experience, particularly on the frontend where we built a dynamic and responsive interface on top of a complex, real-time backend. On the frontend, we gained significant experience in building a dynamic, real-time interface. We got familiar with React, TypeScript, and Vite, including its specific environment variable and TypeScript configurations, which was essential for a smooth development workflow. This project taught us how to build a responsive, truly interactive application that feels alive in the user's hands.

What's next for Cowboy Cash

Our next steps are to build out the full user authentication and collaborative budget-sharing system. We also had planned to add historical spending analysis and enhance the AI to provide even more personalized financial insights over time.