Novu | Devpost

Inspiration

We built Novu because every budgeting app we tried felt overly complicated, stressful, or built for people way past the college stage. As students, our finances are unpredictable — part-time jobs, internships, random charges, subscriptions we forgot about, etc. We wanted something that actually understands us and helps us get our money under control without judgment.

What it does

Novu connects to your bank and automatically categorizes your transactions, finds recurring subscriptions, and shows how much you could save by canceling or switching to student discounts. It creates a simple budget based on your real spending and gives you easy-to-understand financial insights. It also includes a small AI chat assistant to explain your spending habits and help you plan for the future.

How we built it

We built the mobile app using Expo + React Native. The backend runs on a T3 stack (Next.js, tRPC, Prisma). We used Supabase for our database and Plaid to securely pull financial data. For categorization and insights, we used a mix of a transaction-tagging model and GPT-style prompting. We designed the UI in Figma to feel clean, calm, and student-friendly.

Challenges we ran into

Plaid’s authentication flow took some time to get right on mobile. Budgeting logic was tricky because we wanted it to feel helpful, not overwhelming. We also had to tune the AI so it explains finances clearly without making things up.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got a fully working app end-to-end in a short timeframe. The subscription detection + student discount savings actually works and feels genuinely useful. And we’re proud of how friendly and simple the UI feels — it doesn’t make you feel bad about your spending.

What we learned

Small, clear insights matter more than walls of charts. Tone matters in finance apps — people stick with tools that feel supportive. And building something students will actually use takes empathy, not just features.