Ecospend

Spend Smarter, Live Better!

Comment

Inspiration

Most budgeting apps show you damage after the fact. You open the app, feel guilty, and never come back.

We wanted to flip that. What if saving money felt like something you could watch grow? Instead of highlighting failure, we built something that visually and instantly rewards restraint.

That's where the garden came from: Every purchase you delay plants something. Every streak keeps it alive. Your financial health becomes something you can actually see growing!

What it does

EcoSpend is a behavioral budgeting app that rewards you for not spending.

  • Log something you want to buy and start a impulse control/delay timer (24 hours in production; 24 seconds in demo mode so judges can see the full loop live).
  • Resist → earn XP, unlock badges, fund your savings goal, and grow your digital garden. Streaks keep the vibe “thriving”; let them slip and the garden can show it needs attention.
  • Dashboard: spending by category, pie chart, A–F spend health (last 30 days), and recent transactions/spending habits.
  • Financial Health Report (/statements): month view with Needed / Impulse / Recurring splits, a health grade from impulse share, and a labeled transaction table (mock data + heuristics for the hackathon).
  • “What if I invested this?”—compound growth on what you spent over that window. $$FV = PV \times (1 + r)^{t}$$

How we built it

  • Frontend: Next.js 14, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion
  • Backend: Python FastAPI (XP Calculation, Nessie proxy)
  • Data: Capital One Nessie API with a seed data fallback
  • State: React Context
  • Infra: Containerized on Docker

Two engineers, 12 hours, feature-vertical split — each person owned full features end to end rather than splitting frontend and backend.

Challenges we ran into

  • Nessie API was intermittently unreachable so we built an automatic seed data fallback to keep the demo reliable if the API is ever down again.
  • Merge conflicts on shared files which we solved with clear file ownership rules and short-lived branches

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The impulse delay mechanic is genuinely novel — no mainstream app does this
  • Full loop working end to end: Nessie data → delay → XP → badge → savings → garden growth
  • The digital garden growing live during the demo makes the concept click instantly

What we learned

  • Streaks and visual progress change behavior better than data alone
  • Feature-vertical splits beat frontend/backend splits for small teams
  • One strong metaphor does more than any feature list

What's next for EcoSpend

  • Browser extension that interrupts checkout pages in real time.
  • Live bank integration — connect Stripe and Plaid to pull real transaction data automatically, replacing manual logging with your actual financial life.
  • Real Fidelity brokerage integration to invest delayed savings directly into a Fidelity index fund.
  • Social garden sharing for accountability to the streak system.
  • Native mobile app for push notifications at the moment of temptation, where impulse delay mechanic is most powerful.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates