Inspiration
The average public university student borrows $31,960 to attain a bachelor's degree (educationdata.org). This leaves a bachelor student with emptier pockets and less room to spend. What the average university student is often unaware of is that hundreds of brands and local businesses that they already know and love are eager to give them exclusive discounts–just for being students. The problem is simple: most students never take advantage of them. Between classes, studying, and their busy schedules, checking for discounts slips their minds, and shopping becomes a one-click transaction. Impulse spending becomes a major struggle for college students–late-night online shopping, convenience purchases, and ‘treat yourself’ moments can quickly add up. As a result, students miss out on savings but also spend more than intended. Pocketed was designed to change that. Our extension connects students to their favorite brands by working invisibly in the background as they shop, assisting them in making better financial decisions. Meanwhile, our website centralizes online deals and displays a map to show local campus discounts. Students can even connect with friends, share savings progress, and discover new deals.
What it does
Pocketed makes saving for students effortless by changing the way students shop. We help students keep more money in their pockets while building smart financial instincts.
At its core, Pocketed features a Chrome extension that acts invisibly in the background to automatically detect student discounts as users browse online stores. When a deal is found, a clean, instant pop-up notification appears, allowing the student to visit our web application to redeem the discount. The process takes less than a minute, giving students an easier and efficient way to claim their well-deserved markdowns. The ‘Shop Now’ button on our web page directs users to a Google search for stores compatible with these deals.
Pocketed analyzes browsing patterns to identify potential impulse purchases and gently prompts the user to rethink before checkout, helping catch those late-night shopping splurges before they become regrets.
Our web platform takes these savings even further. Students can discover discounts by browsing verified deals, find physical enterprise deals near their location using the map on our platform, monitor their personal savings through their personal savings dashboard, and compete on a social leaderboard with friends to see who saves the most, motivating them to save more and build habits that sustain their full pockets.
With smart notifications, impulse detection, and location-based discovery, Pocketed turns passive savings into active engagement.
How we built it
We developed this application using a modern full-stack architecture. The frontend leverages Jinja templating with JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to deliver a user interface. For backend services, we implemented Firebase for secure user authentication and database management. JavaScript handles the application logic components, creating a pipeline for intelligent data processing.
Challenges we ran into
One major challenge was syncing our GitHub repository so the team could work together smoothly. To overcome this, we manually had to commit our edits into our GitHub repository by copy-and-pasting our Visual Studio code into our files. Additionally, we faced difficulties integrating Firebase with our Jinja templates due to differing data structures and rendering. To overcome this, we had to utilize AI to help integrate our backend data with our frontend templates, which saved time and reduced errors. A key challenge we faced was converting our impulse detection model from Python to JavaScript for use in a Chrome extension. Since extensions can’t run Python natively, we had to translate the model’s logic and calculations into JavaScript and learn how to access page data in real time. This highlighted the difficulties of moving a model between languages while ensuring it worked efficiently in the browser.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Building a fully functional Chrome extension to detect student discounts in real time.
- Integrating technology to provide thoughtful prompts for impulsive purchases
- Adding a location-based deal finder that can sort physical in-store deals by distance from user’s current location
What we learned
Through our project, we learned how to coordinate a multi-disciplinary project with clear divisions of roles, equally dividing the work between frontend and backend. We gained practical skills in web development, Chrome extension development, debugging, and integrating templates.
What's next for Pocketed
Our next goal for Pocketed is to implement a web scraper that continuously collects new student deals from a variety of online stores. This will allow our system to automatically update the database with the latest discounts. We also plan to enhance the Chrome extension so that the scraped deals’ details, including the code or coupon, appear directly in the pop-up notification. This way, students can immediately access and use discounts without leaving their shopping page, making the saving process faster and completely seamless.
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