Her Two Cents

Taking charge, one cent at a time.

Comment 4

Inspiration

Every member on our team is graduating this semester, and we realized that we don’t have an efficient way to budget our money once we enter our full-time jobs. But beyond that, we also recognized a bigger issue—women have historically been left out of financial conversations, making personal finance feel unapproachable and overwhelming. We wanted to change that. With Her Two Cents, we’re making budgeting more accessible, engaging, and tailored for women by integrating features that go beyond just numbers. Our app simplifies budgeting without complicated financial jargon, while also incorporating a chatbot for financial guidance and a vision board to help users set and visualize their financial goals. By blending practical money management with creativity and conversation, we’re ensuring that finance isn’t just something women have to navigate—it’s something they can own.

What it does

Her Two Cents makes budgeting effortless and empowering by automating the 50/30/20 rule, helping users allocate their income into essentials, future savings, and guilt-free spending. Users can also customize these percentages to fit their personal financial goals. Smart Budgeting: Easily log expenses, which are automatically categorized to track spending habits at a glance. Chatbot Assistance: Meet Penny, your personal finance guide, who helps determine if a purchase is a need or just a want. Vision Board for Motivation: Stay inspired by searching for and uploading images of what you're saving for, turning financial goals into visual motivation. By combining practical budgeting tools with interactive features, Her Two Cents makes managing money simple, personalized, and fun.

How we built it

We built Her Two Cents using React for the front end and Firebase for our database. We implemented Google Gemini to build our AI chatbot. Hosting is done through Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

Pinterest API Connecting Vercel to GoDaddy

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Strengthening our Full Stack Development For this year’s WiCHacks we took to heart the suggestions and critiques of the previous year and decided to increase our development prowess by implementing a database and full functional backend. Instead of fully relying on an API to handle our login and user information, we created our authorization process and store user information using Firebase. Our efficiency and strong communication skills allowed us to divy up this labor while still achieving our minimally viable product (MVP).

What we learned

Gemini API Integration For this project we decided to implement a chatbot to assist users in their financial journey, specifically for these three tasks: Suggestions on how to better manage their finances given their profile information, whether or not Penny believes a purchase should be made, and custom financial prompts decided by the user. The team prior to the project had never integrated AI into a front end application of this nature, so approaching this new technology was a challenge, but one well met. We learned more about how to set up the system instructions to focus our model behavior and enable users to get quicker, more fine tuned responses without needing to tell Penny information about our site or their overall purpose in messaging her. As well, we delved into the many ways we could efficiently use Gemini for our purposes, crafting custom prompts for the user and utilizing our Firebase database to have our prompts be fully tailored to the user. We learned Gemini is a powerful tool and utilizing AI to our advantage makes our project able to help out many more users with any questions they may have!

What's next for Her Two Cents

Some exciting features we plan to add to make Her Two Cents even more powerful and personalized include having saving goals to track progress in real time. We would also like to implement smart budget alerts to send notifications when you’re approaching your spending limit, helping you stay on track without surprise.

Built With

+ 65 more
Share this project:

Updates