ElderEdge

Inspiration

100M+ retired professionals. 60M+ small businesses. Zero platforms connecting them.

Engineers, doctors, IAS officers, entrepreneurs — they retire with decades of irreplaceable knowledge that quietly disappears. Meanwhile, students and small businesses worldwide are locked out of quality mentorship because it costs too much or is too far away. ElderEdge was built to fix both problems at once.

What it does

ElderEdge is a global micro-mentoring platform where retired professionals share their expertise through affordable 30-minute sessions.

• AI-powered matching — Mentee describes their problem in plain language → Llama 3.3 70B ranks the top 3 mentors with personalised reasons
• Truly global — Sessions priced in local currency ($20–80 in US, ₹100–500 in India, £15–60 in UK)
• 12+ domains — Medicine, Engineering, IT, Law, Finance, Government, Defence, Teaching, Entrepreneurship and more
• First session always free — Zero risk for every mentee

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

• Serving a pure HTML frontend through Flask without CORS errors required careful route architecture
• Getting Llama 3 to return consistent, parseable JSON required prompt engineering + a fallback mechanism for edge cases
• Designing a fair global pricing model across 30+ currencies with vastly different cost-of-living realities

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Fully working full-stack product with real AI matching — built in under 24 hours
• Llama 3 matching tested across all 12 domains — accurate and fast
• Two social problems solved simultaneously — retired professionals gain income + purpose; students and SMEs gain affordable world-class guidance
• Infrastructure cost: ₹0 — entirely free-tier, zero barriers to deploy

What we learned

• Flask can serve both a REST API and a static frontend from a single process — no separate servers needed
• The hardest part of a social good product isn't the code — it's clearly defining who you're helping and why no one else is helping them yet

What's next for Elder Edge

• In-app video sessions — no external Meet link needed
• Multilingual support — mentees interact in their native language
• Smarter AI personalization — matching improves with every session rating
• Mobile app — making mentorship accessible even on low-end devices
• Verified mentor badges — credential verification for trust

Built With

• aws-amplify
• aws-ec2
• css
• flask
• html
• javascript
• llama
• sqlite