HealthPlan AI – the AI Health Insurance Marketplace Assistant

Inspiration

Dealing with health insurance is one of the most frustrating parts of American life - and the challenges can start the moment you try to sign up. Inspired by my boyfriend’s negative experience trying to find a decent plan, I built this app to offer a better experience. The AI agent helps you explore real options, explains confusing terms, and doesn’t try to sell you anything.

What I Built

This is a simple web app (React Vite) with a voice assistant that helps people look through real federal marketplace health insurance data and plans. It currently only works for 1-person households. The app uses:

ElevenLabs for the AI voice assistant
Supabase Edge Functions to fetch and filter live plan data from the CMS federal marketplace
A UI that updates alongside what the agent is saying
Bolt.new to build the whole thing without needing to set up a local dev environment
Netlify to deploy it with no hassle

How I Built It

Built the whole stack in Bolt.new – super fast, runs in the browser, no setup
Used Supabase Edge Functions to handle the API calls to CMS
Created a Conversational AI Agent in ElevenLabs with knowledge and clear instructions on how the complicated conversation flow is supposed to happen
Wrote some tools (webhooks + client-side functions) so the AI agent can update the page and trigger backend logic
Frontend: React + Tailwind
Deployed to Netlify – no issues, dev and prod behave the same

What I Learned

How to connect a real-time voice agent to live government data using serverless functions
Designing a user experience that doesn’t add more stress to an already stressful topic like healthcare
Building Supabase Edge Functions
Making custom tools for the AI agent to use, including webhook tools and client-side tools that manipulate the page in response to the conversation
Bolt is amazing for full-stack prototyping! I like that it's all in the browser, which means no setup problems or dealing with dependencies or package installs
Super easy deployment with Netlify — everything works exactly like it does in development without surprises (unlike for me often with, say, Vercel)

Challenges

The CMS API is complex
Handling eligibility rules and edge cases across states (e.g., Medicaid expansion gaps)
Ensuring the voice assistant could both speak clearly and show relevant content on-screen
Keeping the app lightweight while integrating multiple services (Supabase, ElevenLabs, etc.)