Cut | Devpost

Inspiration

Our inspiration for our app came from the fact that we as a collective realized we went out to eat way too much. As a whole, we came to the conclusion that especially as collegiate level students, budgeting and saving are a must in order to pay for more important things like tuition and rent. Therefore, we built an app called “Cut” which is an all-in-one application to help encourage college students to go out to eat less.

What it does

The Cut App allows for college students and their friends to form groups to encourage better spending habits on take out. Users can set spending habits for their groups and visually see how much they go out and spend every given week.

The Cut App has a location tracker built in that helps track whether or not a user has been around a restaurant for long enough and will send a notification to the user checking in to ask how much they spent. This data populates across all groups as users can set not only a primary group, but multiple other groups as well.

On the app, users can also manually input places they went out to if they go in advance, or their phone dies to help promote app usage, as well as help users keep on track of their spending habits.

How we built it

We built our App using a FRN stack. We used Google’s Firebase as our database host and that allowed us to store users, visit data, and group data. Our frontend was built on React Expo which allowed us to create all of the visual components and easily natively link our Firebase datastore to our frontend. Node was used to install the packages and help manage our package installations and run our application testing.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into multiple challenges during our development process. We experienced errors with our package manager as well as linking our Android Studio to our local devices. We experienced multiple bugs within our project which we as a team collaborated to fix and improve to build our final product. The challenges of development bugs made it exceptionally difficult, but through dedicated perseverance and teamwork, we successfully squandered all of the challenges we faced.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The most noteworthy accomplishment that we are certainly proud of is the creation of our application and all of the features that were once just an idea, have now become a reality. Specifically, accomplishments we are proud of is the entire notification process linked with our location tracking and in-app updating. We are also very proud of how our user interface came to be from our original design to make a user friendly application. We are also proud of our organization process that took lots of planning and careful consideration the entire way to form Cut.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the development process of an application. We came in knowing it would take lots of work, but the amount of work that actually went into the project was way beyond any of our expectations. We learned a lot about firebase and all it has to offer. We learned loads about React Expo and how it makes the entire mobile application development process that much easier.

What's next for Cut

We were able to get a lot done but there are some features that we will be adding in the near future. After we catch up on some of the lost hours of sleep we would like to add some other ways to compete with your friends like keeping track of who spends the most time in the library studying or other things like that!