PocketCats.Co

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Inspiration

We are perplexed by impulse spending and wish to cultivate healthier spending behaviors. Our ideas are inspired by the 50-30-20 rule, and we've gamified the process to incentivize users to develop better spending habits.

What it does

PocketCats is a gamified spending tracker designed to encourage users to maintain balanced spending habits while taking care of cats in the game. Users record their transactions as 'needs' or 'wants' and set their ideal ratios for saving, needs, and wants. This data is converted into virtual currencies in-game: Cat Coins, Cat Chomps, and Cat Care. Cat Chomps measure the user’s needs - by achieving their spending goals in this category, users satisfy both their own needs and those of their Pocket Cats. Conversely, Cat Care quantifies the percentage of their spending dedicated to 'wants', relative to their spending goals. Balancing these aspects according to preset goals is crucial for the optimal care of their virtual kittens. Finally, Cat Coins are awarded at the end of each month based on the user’s ability to meet or exceed their monthly savings goals. These can be used to adopt additional cats or buy decorative items like mugs.

How we built it

We developed a Figma prototype for a better design and used Kintone for our database management. The backend is powered by Python and Flask, while the frontend utilizes React. Additionally, our web application manages user credentials, allowing users to authenticate before logging daily transactions or monitoring their spending habits

Challenges we ran into

Being new to React, we invested a considerable amount of time in mastering it. Turning transactions into game currency and devising the economy rules posed a significant challenge. We spent a lot of time considering how to manage situations where users make a large purchase at once.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our innovative idea to gamify the spending tracker. This approach not only combats impulse spending but also fosters positive spending habits among users.

What we learned

We learned the react front-end development from scratch. We were only familiar with the HTML/CSS frontend development before. However, we decided to use react in this project in order to learn new skills. We also learned to use Kintone, one of our sponsors, to build the database, and use it to build up our backend, and connecting our frontend and backend after learning implementations of the flask library in python.

What's next for PocketCats.Co

Add in more cat, food, and toy types
Complete the pie chart to show the distribution of spending and saving
Connecting frontend and backend development all together (developed separately, we are having 2/4 people working on the frontend and 2/4 people working on the backend simultaneously, we have both ends working for our project, but we didn't get enough time to put it all together as an app)
deploy our project
add the cat leaving feature and the animations