Jobucks | Next-Gen Pocket Money

Jobucks is a weekly chore tracker and virtual savings account, synced between all family members via a Virtual Private Bank.

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Inspiration

  • We needed a way to track our kids savings, however, our kids are too young for a real bank account.
  • Our kids also need motivation to help around the house.

This app solves kids chore and savings tracking, synced across parent and kid devices.

What it does

  • Tracks chores and savings in a "Virtual Family Bank"
  • Parents assign weekly jobs to their kids, which sync to the kids' app.
  • Kids mark jobs as complete, instantly notifying parents for job approval.
  • Kids are paid in "Jobucks" a virtual currency representing real money.
  • The app functions as a savings tracker for kids, supporting deposits, withdrawals, and transaction reporting—just like a real bank, yet not a real bank, a VIRTUAL bank so kids can learn.

How we built it

Expo + AWS Amplify (Gen 2) back end

Challenges we ran into

  • UI inconsistencies across phones vs tablets & Android vs iOS.
  • Fine tuning the data schema for optimised pub/sub and reduced network calls.
  • The balancing act of Optimistic UI
  • Getting across all of that other out-of-app stuff like data security, privacy, GDPR compliance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our two kids are the beta testers and Jobucks is actually making an impact on their attitude to helping around the house and thinking twice before spending hard earned money!

What we learned

So much! We knew nothing about Expo prior. It helped that we knew React ahead of time though.

What's next for Jobucks

Savings targets, a zippier UI, more currencies, acheivements, streaks, streak bounties, data export, quality of life refinements, whatever the end users submit as feature requests... oh and lots of marketing to get the word out.

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