Moola

Sign-up form using Auth0
Moola's Homepage
Bottom of Moola's Homepage
Personal Information Onboarding Slide
Interests Onboarding Slide
Financial Information Onboarding Slide
AI Chatbox

Inspiration

Money touches every part of our lives, but financial literacy is rarely taught in schools or workplaces. As young adults, we’ve experienced how confusing it can be to figure out budgeting, saving, credit, and long-term planning without clear guidance.

In Miami, we love saying “moolah,” and that inspired us to build something that makes financial literacy feel natural and easy to use. We wanted to create a tool that’s accessible and adaptable for everyone - from students to families to professionals.

That’s how Moola was born: an AI-powered financial coach that helps people make smarter money moves with clarity and confidence.

What it does

Moola helps users understand their finances, set realistic goals, and receive personalized advice. After signing in with Auth0, users go through a short onboarding flow where they enter basic info, select their financial priorities, and upload a bank statement PDF. From there, Google Gemini generates tailored recommendations, whether that is improving credit, paying off debt, or saving for retirement. Our dashboard and chatbox provide continuous motivational guidance, so every time a user logs in, they leave with actionable next steps towards their goals - and even a little more moolah in their pocket!

How we built it

The frontend is built with React 19, React Router v7, and Material UI with a custom dark theme. We designed a smooth onboarding stepper for collecting user info and financial inputs, and built an interactive chatbox for real-time advice. On the backend, we used Node.js, Express, and Supabase for database storage. Auth0 handles authentication and Google Gemini API powers the financial coaching.

Challenges we ran into

There was honestly a true learning curve these past 3 days, but we took it as a great challenge to learn and explore. A couple minor challenges we ran into was figuring out Git collaboration quickly as it was something we've never used before in a team setting, troubleshoot React component bugs, and get our authentication working smoothly with Auth0. Cloud deployment was probably the biggest challenge overall as our frontend and backend were unable to deploy on Render for over 4 hours since 3am. We spent quite some time figuring out what the issue was and even explored other deployment services like Netlify and Docker. We all felt like there was no hope, but we made sure to push through as we believed in our project and within each other. We even reached out to other peers and mentors! Through lots of research we were able to deploy through Render deploy and get our project up and running in a server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first hackathon, and we gave it everything we had (plus way too much caffeine, thanks INIT!). Luis focused on AI integration and prompting, Ousman worked on backend and deployment while helping us solve issues as a team, and Humza and I (Karina) tackled the frontend, learning React and Material UI from scratch. Together, we built an MVP project that includes secure login, onboarding, personal AI guidance and insights, and a well structured dashboard - all in just one weekend. More than anything, we’re proud of how much we learned, how we worked together, and how much fun we had bringing Moola to life.

What we learned

We learned how to collaborate effectively as a team under time pressure, using Git and GitHub to keep everything moving. We gained hands-on experience with new tools: frontend development with React and Material UI, authentication with Auth0, database storage with Supabase, and AI prompting with Google Gemini. More importantly, we learned how to lean on each others strengths, organize ourselves and adapt quickly when things broke to be able to turn uncertainty into effective working solutions.