FareClaim

High gas/fuel prices push us to public transport, but glitchy systems penalise us with hidden public transport overcharges in Australia. FareClaim helps commuters to track and recover unfair charges.

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Inspiration

The soaring cost of fuel and everyday living expenses has forced many Australians to leave their cars at home and take public transport. But commuters are finding themselves stung by fixed fare penalties when the transit system glitches, which quietly drains their bank accounts.

I felt their pain.

They can claim this money back, but the process requires logging into an outdated government portal, where manually auditing every line of transit history is painful.

I felt their pain.

What it does

I teamed up with Peter Wei and Dwight Ian De Jesus to build Fare Claim to help commuters take their money back.

Commuters can just upload their transit history to Fare Claim. The system instantly identifies missing touch-offs and formats the exact claim for commuters. It also allows them to share the overcharges with the legacy government portal with one-click parsing.

We made finding and lodging overcharges simple.

How we built it

We built the front end using React and deployed it on Cloudflare. When a commuter uploads their transit history, a TypeScript rules engine processes the backend data pipeline to detect overcharges. We then use OpenAI models to draft the exact reason for the overcharge claim.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was turning a complex idea into a simple product quickly.

Fare statements can be confusing PDFs or CSVs, and commuters may not know which charges are unfair. We simplified the experience into three steps: upload a statement, find possible fare issues, and get AI help writing a clear claim.

We also had to make sure the AI supported the commuter without inventing facts. FareClaim uses evidence from the statement first, while the user remains in control of the final claim.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built this entire platform as a small team of volunteers. We did not receive a single dollar of government grants or corporate funding. We are proud to give FareClaim away for free to every commuter in Sydney, Melbourne and SE Queensland, proving that you do not need millions in backing to fix a broken system and help people.

What we learned

We learned that the most powerful software does not just perform a task. It restores a sense of agency. People are tired of being squeezed by inflation and corporate indifference. Giving someone back $100 they didn’t know they lost builds immense trust. We made FareClaim entirely free because getting your own money back should not cost a thing.

What's next for FareClaim

Our immediate focus is distribution. We want to get this tool into the hands of as many Australian commuters as possible. The cost of living is squeezing local families, and nobody should be paying for a transit system's mistakes. We will be promoting FareClaim locally so more people can scan their history, find their missing money, and ease the pressure on their weekly budgets.

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