🌱 PocketBloom
Your money, in your pocket — not on someone's server.
Inspiration
The inspiration for PocketBloom came from a simple problem: understanding where our money actually goes.
After going out for barbecue with friends and filling up my car, I realized I couldn't easily answer two questions: How much was I spending on dining out, and what was my car actually costing me?
The information was already there, but it was scattered across different bank accounts and credit cards. Understanding my spending meant manually organizing transactions across multiple applications and spreadsheets.
We realized that many people face the same challenge. While financial apps provide access to transaction histories, turning that information into a clear picture of everyday spending can still require significant effort.
Our team wanted to create a solution that makes personal finance management more convenient, accurate, and accessible without compromising users' privacy.
That's how PocketBloom began.
What It Does
PocketBloom is a privacy-focused personal finance application that brings financial information together in one place, helping users understand their spending and make informed financial decisions.
By connecting their bank accounts and credit cards, users can automatically track transactions, explore detailed spending categories, and visualize their financial activity through interactive charts.
PocketBloom also includes several features designed to simplify everyday financial management:
- Automatic expense tracking: Consolidates transactions from multiple financial accounts and organizes them into detailed categories.
- Receipt scanning: Uses on-device text recognition to extract purchase information and match receipts to existing bank transactions, preventing duplicate expenses.
- Credit card recommendations: Identifies nearby merchants and compares credit card reward rates to help users choose which card to use.
- Flexible budgeting: Allows users to create and manage personalized budgets if they prefer a more hands-on approach.
- Accurate spending insights: Distinguishes actual purchases from transfers and credit card payments to provide more meaningful spending totals.
Privacy is central to PocketBloom's design. Transaction histories are stored locally on the user's device rather than on our backend, giving users greater control over their financial information.
How We Built It
We developed PocketBloom as a fully native iOS application using Swift, SwiftUI, and Swift Charts.
For financial account integration, we use Plaid through a Node.js and Express backend. The backend securely manages encrypted bank access tokens, while the application stores users' transaction records locally.
We integrated Apple's Vision framework to extract information from receipts directly on the device. Our receipt-matching system then compares the extracted purchase amount and date against existing transactions to identify potential matches.
For our credit card recommendation feature, we use MapKit and CoreLocation to identify nearby merchants. Gemini 3 Flash with Google Search grounding retrieves published credit card reward rates, allowing us to support cards that haven't been manually added to the application.
One important design decision was separating AI-generated information from financial calculations. Gemini retrieves reward information, but it does not receive users' transaction histories or calculate their spending totals. Those calculations are performed directly in Swift.
We also implemented local data storage, automated builds, and testing to improve the application's reliability.
Challenges We Ran Into
One of our biggest challenges was ensuring the accuracy of financial information. Unlike many applications, financial software can produce errors that aren't immediately obvious to users.
We encountered issues with transaction dates, pending purchases, and transfers being incorrectly counted as expenses. Receipt scanning also presented challenges with different receipt formats. We addressed these problems through real-world testing and user confirmation when matches were uncertain.
Accomplishments That We're Proud Of
We're proud of building a privacy-focused personal finance app that combines automatic expense tracking, receipt scanning, and credit card recommendations. We also developed a reliable receipt-matching system and implemented local-first storage to give users greater control over their financial information.
What We Learned
We gained hands-on experience with native iOS development, financial APIs, on-device text recognition, and secure data handling. Most importantly, we learned that financial applications require careful testing because even small errors can significantly affect the accuracy of users' financial information.
What's Next
We plan to introduce item-level receipt categorization, subscription tracking, and insights into missed credit card rewards. We also want to implement encrypted backups so users can securely recover their financial information.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.