Ga$Back

Putting the fair in fare: Ga$Back allows you to accurately price trips based on car model, distance, and local gas prices in order to equitably pay back friends and family for gas.

Comment

Inspiration

Ridesharing with friends and family always causes money complications. How much did we really spend on gas? How much should you pay without shorting or overpaying? With Ga$Back, you can now accurately see the cost of the trip by vehicle type, distance traveled, and gas price for the city.

What it Does

We allow the users to add the make, model, and year to get the current mpg of the vehicle to accurately track the cost of the trip to give a final price to know what is owed. The data collected using the app could help determine tax write-offs, or just help you pay friends/family and encourage ridesharing.

How We Built It

We used React Native, Collect API for gas prices, Google Maps for distances traveled, and vehicle data from the US Department of Transportation for fuel-efficiency.

Challenges We Ran Into

  • Organization: Nobody had done a hackathon before, and it was hard to section out work equally based on programming experience and interest
  • Learning: Most of our tools to build the project were new to most of our members
  • Managing Expectations: Our initial ideas for the project ended up being way beyond the scope of a hackathon, so we had to work backwards and selectively include aspects that were necessary for the minimum viable product

Accomplishments

  • Using API to increase accuracy of cost estimates
  • Calculating distance travelled from real coordinate data
  • Finding fuel efficiency of a given car via scraped and sorted data and an API implementation
  • UI Design
  • Managing multiple sub-teams to work on separate branches of the application
  • Becoming familiar with new languages and frameworks

What We Learned

Most team members had never used React Native, some had limited knowledge in React, and one had never used JavaScript. We also all learned more about git and project management/branching. We gained a lot of first-hand experience in development and managing expectations for our minimum viable product.

What's Next for Ga$Back

  • Options menu with ability to select currency type or units of measurement
  • Type-search for make/model/year to streamline UX
  • Functionality for license plate scanning to determine make/model/year data without user input
  • Payment options directly integrated into the app (Venmo/Paypal/CashApp)
  • Ability to split payments between multiple users to aide carpooling
  • Integration with Google maps to show a live feed of distance travelled
Share this project:

Updates