NihiliFi

Inspiration

A penguin went viral for walking away from his colony toward certain death.. calm, deliberate, unbothered. People saw themselves in him. Especially around money. NihiliFi is for everyone who feels like that penguin every time they check their bank account.

What it does

Analyzes your spending history against your Google Calendar to find hidden patterns then narrates them back in a Werner Herzog documentary voice as a penguin walks toward the mountains. Every bad financial decision walks him further inland. Good ones bring him back. At 70KM, he's gone.

It finds things like: "you spend 3x more on food delivery during weeks with 3+ social events." Then it warns you before the damage happens. Not after.

How I built it

Next.js, Gemini 1.5 Pro for behavioral analysis, ElevenLabs for the Herzog narration, deployed on DigitalOcean. The hardest part was getting Gemini to return real insights tied to actual spending patterns, not generic budget advice.

Challenges I ran into

Engineering the Gemini prompt to produce both structured data AND a 200-word Herzog-style narration that actually referenced the user's real life. Getting the tone right took a while. Also doing all of this solo in 24 hours.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The moment the narration plays over the penguin walking animation actually lands. It's funny and bleak and somehow motivating. That was the goal.

What I learned

Build toward one moment that makes judges feel something. Everything else supports that moment.

What's next for NihiliFi

Live bank connections via Plaid, Snowflake for richer data analysis, and a social mode where friends can pull your penguin back from the mountains together.

Built With

• digitalocean
• elevenlabsapi
• geminiapi
• next.js
• tailwind
• typescript