Fin-Sight

Home Page
Chat page with two modes - newbie and veteran
Visual representation of tracked assets - Includes Risk analysis section
GIF
Add a new Asset and risk analysis of new asset
GIF
Risk Analysis for tracked asset
GIF
Asset Specific Chat - for more details and clarifications regd. asset.
GIF
News Page - contains "How this effects you?" functionality

Inspiration

As long-time admirers of Perplexity, we were thrilled by this hackathon. We immediately thought: what better application for Sonar’s real-time citation-backed search and intelligence than the dynamic world of stocks and investment ? Sonar is uniquely positioned to tackle challenges in stock trading and investment analysis.

The core idea sparked from personal experience last year. When starting my investment journey, it struck me how daunting and complex stocks can be, with a very steep learning curve. This was a personal pain point, and a quick survey among friends, family, and even strangers confirmed the same sentiment. There's a clear need for a personalised, up-to-date, intelligent teacher for stocks and investments.

This vision initially felt ambitious, perhaps even overwhelming. However, that uncertainty vanished after diving into Sonar’s documentation. It became crystal clear: Sonar wasn’t just suitable, it was the perfect engine to bring FinSight to life. This realization fueled our most ambitious project yet, accomplished in a compressed timeframe of just 10 days.

What it does

FinSight

AI-Powered Personal Finance & Investing Assistant with Risk Intelligence.

It’s not just a chat bot. It is much more than that. It includes real-time market and asset tracking, latest news fetched from reputed sources, and a country specific onboarding guide for absolute beginners. It is designed for both newbies and veteran investors.

FinSight is an all-in-one personal finance and investing assistant designed to make first-time investing less intimidating and a lot more insightful. Combining real-time data, intuitive clean design, and explainable AI, FinSight turns financial curiosity into confident action — no jargon, no black boxes.

Features

1. Real-Time Market News

Knowledge is power in investment, the more information you have the more likely you will make a better decision. Stay updated with an AI-curated news feed tailored to your watchlist. Powered by Perplexity’s Sonar API, the feed pulls citation-backed stories and ties them contextually to the stocks you track. It also includes a button under every news which warns you if and how the news affects your tracked assets.

2. Visual Asset Tracker

This is an interactive dashboard that displays:

Live price, it's movements and daily/weekly change indicators
At-a-glance mini trend graphs for quick insights
Latest stock-specific news
Industry classification
A context aware chat feature, for those who want know, analyse more about this asset.
Aimed more at veterans is the expandable Risk Insight panel for deeper analysis.
Beginner friendly UI that changes border colour of asset, based on it’s current risk factor and volatility.

Everything you need to understand your assets — at a glance.

3. Risk Analysis Engine

Go beyond price tracking. The risk engine offers real-time, explainable insights across:

Volatility Trends: Historical and implied volatility metrics
Sector Stability: Resilience of the broader industry
Sentiment Signals: AI-powered read on market mood via options activity and analyst chatter

Risk levels are color-coded, educational, and fully transparent — no black-box ratings

4. Conversational Chat Assistant

Your 24/7 investing companion powered by Sonar API. Ask questions, get explanations, or explore strategies — all in plain, friendly language. Perfect for demystifying complex terms or brainstorming investment ideas.

This page includes:

A unique button, to switch between newbie, which offers beginner friendly responses and veteran, which doesn’t hold back on jargon,
A chat history to revisit your questions
Includes dynamic suggestions to get you started without any confusion.

5. Guide to the Curious

A beginner-first educational space featuring:

Country-specific onboarding to investment and stocks
Walkthroughs for prerequisites, account setup, taxes, and regulations
Step-by-step investing guides
AI assistant powered by Sonar to help you if you are stuck.

No guesswork — just guidance that adapts to your context.

What Makes FinSight Different

Beginner-Friendly by Design: Built from the ground up for those with no prior knowledge assumed, featuring an unintimidating interface.
Country-Sensitive Customization: Tailored onboarding and information for Indian users, addressing unique market hurdles.
Integrated Learning Loop: Seamlessly Track → Read → Understand Risk → Act → Learn, all within one platform.
Truly Explainable AI: Our AI doesn't just tell you what; it teaches you why, fostering genuine understanding.
Relaxed and Visual UI: Designed to encourage curiosity and exploration by reducing overwhelm and making complex data approachable.

Who It’s For

New investors unsure where to start or feeling overwhelmed by complexity.
Veteran investors looking for personalised tracking, advanced risk insights and predictions.
Indian users navigating unique investing hurdles (KYC, tax frameworks, broker selection).
Individuals eager to learn why a stock moves — not just that it does.
Curious explorers who learn best by doing and engaging, not by memorizing abstract theory.

What’s Coming Next

FinSight is built with scalability in mind. Future plans include:

Comprehensive portfolio tracking
Personalized, AI-driven alerts and notifications
Social investing and community features for peer learning

Core Belief

FinSight doesn’t just track stocks — it teaches, explains, and grows with you. From anxiety to insight, from confusion to clarity.

How we built it

Category	Technologies
Languages & Frameworks	FastAPI, React, Tailwind CSS
AI/ML Tools & APIs	Sonar Pro API, Sonar Deep Research API
Cloud & DevOps	Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Docker

FinSight was rapidly developed using Python (FastAPI) for a robust and performant backend, coupled with React and Tailwind CSS for a responsive, modern, and visually appealing frontend.

The Perplexity Sonar API was pivotal, forming the backbone of our real-time news and data aggregation features. Although the same sonar back end was used for so many features, we put large effort to into its configuration and making each api call tailored to that feature and efficient. We chose and written our back end and sonar’s model, parameters, response format with great care - each request performing single job efficiently and no overlapping.

For example: In context of tracker page, we experimented with a lot of websites and sources to pull stock price and volatility information accurately and Sonar's sources were restricted to identified best performing sources.

Similarly, for a feature like guide, we modified the parameters to include searches to the country selected by the user in interface. This will ensure that sections like prerequisites, requirements and necessary documents to be accurate up to date.

One more important technical detail we focused on was the balance between caching and reloads. In the world of stocks, everything changes every second. But we can’t pull these changes every second, at least not for this hackathon. So we implemented caching mechanisms for all pages. We will use cached data for repeat requests, but to ensure relevance we are deleting this cache after 24hrs. So we are forcing reloads of the data after 24hrs irrespective caching.

While the technology stack was critical, our "love and care" translated into a meticulous focus on user experience, ensuring every feature and design choice prioritized a beginner-friendly and intuitive journey into the world of investing.

Challenges we ran into

The Condensed Timeline: Our primary challenge was the aggressive 10-day project window from ideation to submission. This demanded extreme focus, ruthless prioritization of core features, and efficient parallel development streams. We had to make quick decisions on design and architecture to ensure we could integrate the Sonar API effectively and build out a polished user interface within the deadline.
Data updates, caching and refresh: As mentioned previously this was a big concern for us during developed. Striking balance between caching and reloads and still be of use to users was crucial. But to save costs we went with very conservative approach, at least for some pages.
Deployment: Since this is our most ambitious project yet, we want this to be accessible to everyone, very easily. So we decided to host this on our domain that’s been collecting dust. But this did not go smoothly at all. We faced an immense challenge deploying this into google cloud. Configuring load balancer? Deploying into an instance? Attaching certificates to load balancer? DNS configurations? Not easy. At all. We gravely under estimated this task. But we did manage to pull through in the given time.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

We are incredibly proud of transforming our initial vision for a personalized investment guide into a deployed, functional, and value-driven application. Specifically:

Delivering on our Core Mission: Successfully integrating real-time data via the Sonar API to provide clear, actionable, and educational insights for novice investors.
Rapid, Quality Execution: Developing and deploying a feature-rich product, including the sophisticated AI Risk Analysis Engine, within such a constrained timeframe is a testament to our team's dedication and agile execution.
Bringing an Idea to Life: Seeing FinSight go from a concept to a globally accessible tool that can genuinely help demystify investing for beginners.
Designing for Real People: We are proud to have crafted a clean, intuitive, and beginner-friendly interface that removes intimidation from investing. The UI reflects our core belief: learning finance should feel empowering — not overwhelming.

What we learned

This project was an intense and invaluable learning experience on multiple fronts:

Full-Stack Deployment Under Pressure: Beyond deepening our technical skills with FastAPI, React, and the Sonar API integration, we gained crucial hands-on experience with the complete deployment lifecycle. This included domain registration, SSL certificate setup, and deploying the entire project to a globally accessible website.
The Value of Real-World Application: While time-consuming, navigating the practicalities of deployment taught us immeasurably about bringing a project to life outside of a development environment. This practical knowledge is a major takeaway.
Agile Prioritization: The tight deadline forced us to become adept at making critical decisions about feature scope and focusing our efforts for maximum impact.