Inspiration
You're about to make a purchase—whether dining, groceries, travel, or something else—but which credit card should you use? It can be confusing with hundreds of cards offering different rewards, including rotating categories, cashback, or points. Plus, points vary widely in value across banks, hotels, and airlines. For example, if you have the Amex Platinum card, your points are worth 1 cent each (100% value) when you use them for travel through Amex Travel. However, if you redeem those same points for a statement credit, they drop in value to just 0.6 cents each (only 60% of their full value), meaning you get less for your points.
What it does
MakeCents lets you select (and remembers) the credit cards you currently have. When you're about to make a purchase, like dining, groceries, travel, or gym, it instantly shows you which of your cards offers the best reward at that moment. It explains clearly why a specific card is optimal, compares it to your other cards, and highlights exactly how much value you're getting back in points or cash. You'll never worry again about choosing the right card—you'll always maximize your rewards!
How we built it
- Frontend: React + TailwindCSS
- Backend: Flask + Gemini for parsing and scraping
- Database: Postgres for JSON support
Challenges we ran into
One of the challenges we ran into was constructing the query to rank cards based on category-specific rewards properly. Since each card could have different rewards across multiple categories, and we needed to fall back to default "all" category values if a specific one was missing, the SQL query quickly became very long and complex. Handling multiple fallback scenarios, calculating equivalent reward values, and layering in ranking logic with tie-breakers (like perks size) made the query not only harder to write but also more difficult to maintain and debug.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We've made use of Gemini to help us determine the most optimized credit for a statement.
What's next for Make Cents
- Develop an app integrated with Mobile (Apple/Google/Samsung) Tap to Pay - Manually choose which category or automatically recognize merchant category and allow user to pay on mobile with that card in one swipe.
- Algorithmic optimization - take into user's credit score, recurring debt, and credit cards already owned
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.