DiscountDinner

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Inspiration

Rising food prices make it challenging for individuals and families to stick to a budget while maintaining a balanced diet. We were inspired to create a solution that leverages technology to help people find affordable meal options effortlessly. By combining Flipp’s coupon and deal data with the power of AI, we aim to make meal planning and grocery shopping smarter and more economical.

What it does

DiscountDinner scrapes deals and discounts from Flipp.com to identify affordable grocery items from nearby stores. Using Gemini’s AI capabilities, it generates cheap, balanced meal ideas based on the available ingredients and helps users create cost-effective shopping lists. It’s like having a personal budget-conscious chef in your pocket!

How we built it

Frontend: Built with Svelte for a fast, reactive, responsive and user-friendly interface.
Backend: Managed server-side processing and data handling through SvelteKit’s form actions, which were later deployed to serverless functions.
Web Scraping: Probed Flipp's undocumented and unprotected semi-public API.
AI Integration: Used Gemini for its generous free plan to analyze available deals and suggest meal plans based on the scraped data.

Challenges we ran into

User Experience: Designing an intuitive interface to display meal suggestions, shopping lists, and deals without overwhelming the user. We valued simplicity over complex features.
Too many features: We had many ideas like using Google Maps API to get the most efficient route to take to shop across multiple stores. However, this would have added complexity to the UI
AI Integration: Correctly prompting Gemini to generate formatted meal suggestions that are both affordable and nutritionally balanced required a lot of iteration and testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Participating in out first ever hackathon.
Built something all of us and friends of ours will use.
Successfully building a system that combines deal scraping with AI-powered cost-efficient meal planning.
Learned and used SvelteKit for the first time
Creating a polished full-stack web app using SvelteKit.
Simplicity, the user can accept location permissions and the postal code is automatically loaded into the web-app.

What we learned

How to integrate AI effectively into a consumer-focused application.
Valuable insights into user-centric design for budgeting tools.
The importance of planning which features to implement as to control scope creep.

What's next for DiscountDinner

Personalization: Introduce user profiles to tailor meal suggestions based on dietary preferences and restrictions.
Expanded Sources: Incorporate data from additional grocery and recipe platforms.
Mobile Centrism: Setup a progressive web-app metadata.
Community Sharing: Enable users to share their own budget meal ideas and shopping tips.