Credit Card Helper

Inspiration

As a college student, there are so many things to do. We have to do homework, housework, and etc... We also have to take care of the finance without help from guardian. In a busy schedule everyday, it would be great if someone could help us for free about finance issues. And we saw the challenge topic at TAMUHack. As time goes, there are kiosk instead of check in table in the restaurant. People started to use credit cards more than cash. So, we thought having a beneficial credit card as a college student will be good to save money.

What it does

Our application provides credit card recommendations for college students. We have a list of credit cards with cashback on various categories of purchases. The user will be asked to enter their budgets on these categories and our backend algorithm will find the credit card that gives them the most amount of cashback. In addition, if the user scroll down, we have charts about user's budget distribution, and credit card cashback distribution, and credit card comparison feature. For a better experience, user can talk with power virtual agent. Basically, it informs users the credit card information including the cashback rate per categories, sign-up fee, and card company.

How we built it

We first search up some credit card informations and create our small database, then we transform this database into simple react objects. We then applied formulas based on the spending habits and credit card benefit, at last generate the best result for the users. Tech stack: React/Node, GitHub page

Challenges we ran into

We could not find any database that includes all the information about credit cards from many different companies. So, we had to find a website that combined all the links to the credit card information, and create a dataset for our own.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We integrate various front-end package/libraries into a working project. We also learn how to deploy a race project on cloud.

What we learned

As new hackers, we learned how to make a dataset. We learned how to work as a team with good communication and team cooperation. There are first time hackers in our team, we are glad that the could have a real-world experience of building software.

What's next for Credit Card Helper

For Credit Card Helper, we can expand the dataset as we collect more datas from different credit card company. That will make us able to create a next step which is to collect user's credit card name(title) and find out how much money the user could spend if the user applied to the matched credit card from the first step.