Grocery Budgie

Inspiration

As college students, grocery budgeting is always at top of our minds. But without the time on our hands to hunt around for best deals, sometimes we wish we had a budgeting buddy to help us out.

What it does

Grocery Budgie learns from your past grocery trips to give you suggestions on which stores to visit and which items to buy where.

The user: 1) Uploads their receipts 2) Writes out their grocery list 3) Asks which store to do their groceries at, or what to buy for best value at [X] store

Grocery Budgie: 1) Takes their receipts and runs OCR to extract the receipt text 2) Saves the store, item, and price data 2) Calculates, based on pre-existing data

How we built it

We used react-native to build the app, Gemini and Google Vision for the receipt-reading OCR, and Figma to design and prototype our app.

Challenges we ran into

React-Native was extremely finicky to work with. For a few of our team-members, we weren't able to run our code and test our changes with React-Native Expo for most of the hackathon, meaning progress on the app's functionality had to be scoped down significantly from our original plans.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our cohesive vision and how applicable our product is to our daily lives.

What we learned

Set-up was our biggest challenge. Though this concept was most utilizable as an app and we wanted to stick with our vision, in the future, working with a time crunch, we might pivot to a more reliable framework. We learned more about leveraging AI in niche ways to enhance our lifestyles.

What's next for Grocery Budgie

The first thing we want to do is finish fully integrating with our Firestore backend! We focused on rounding out the product front-end and conceptualization for these 24 hours.

Past that, we want to add fine-grained functionality to make the app more useful to day to day scenarios. We want to: 1) Add an accounts and networking component so the recommendations can be pulled from a wide base of user prices and receipts instead of one individual's data 2) Add functionality to split a grocery list into a user-selected number sublists optimized for best price when split across multiple stores 3) Account for not every store having the same product selection 4) And more!