EcoTrack – Personal Carbon Footprint Tracker

📝 About the Project – BillBuddy

💡 Inspiration

Splitting expenses with friends or roommates often leads to confusion, forgotten payments, and awkward conversations. Whether it's rent, groceries, or a weekend trip, keeping track manually is inefficient and prone to errors. We wanted to create a solution that automates this process and ensures transparency and accountability — so no one ever has to say, "You owe me for last week’s pizza!" again.

🛠️ How We Built It

We used a full stack development approach to bring BillBuddy to life:

Frontend: Built using React.js with Tailwind CSS for a clean, responsive UI.
Backend: Powered by Node.js and Express.js, with RESTful APIs for all core features.
Database: Used MongoDB to store user profiles, transactions, groups, and settlements.
Authentication: Integrated Firebase Auth for secure sign-up and login with Google support.
Deployment: The app is hosted on Render for backend and Vercel for frontend deployment.

⚙️ Key Features

Create groups (e.g., "Roommates", "Trip to Goa")
Add and split expenses by amount, percentage, or custom
View balances and settlements with each person
Real-time sync and updates
Expense history & downloadable summaries

📚 What We Learned

How to manage complex state and relationships between users, groups, and expenses
Building scalable REST APIs and handling authentication across services
Designing user-friendly, intuitive UIs that require minimal onboarding
Working collaboratively using Git & version control in a time-bound setting

🚧 Challenges Faced

Dynamic Split Logic: Creating a flexible splitting logic that works for different cases (equal, uneven, percentage-based) was trickier than expected.
Database Schema Design: Managing many-to-many relationships between users and groups took some careful planning.
Time Management: With limited time, we had to prioritize core features and simplify others for the MVP.
Deployment: Faced some bugs during deployment due to environment variable mismatches and API routes.

✅ Final Thoughts

BillBuddy helped us address a common pain point in our daily lives using full stack web development. We’re proud of what we accomplished in a short span, and we see potential for this app to be used by students, roommates, travelers, and anyone who shares expenses with others. We plan to add features like expense reminders, UPI integration, and visual analytics in the future.